


the year we built the windows

by transversely



Category: 7 Seeds
Genre: Ensemble Cast, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 13:59:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 33,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5542526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transversely/pseuds/transversely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"How do you know I'm cutting paddles," said Nijiko, planing another board neatly and dropping the paddle into a crate labelled PADDLES (NONWEAPONIZED).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. reservoir

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ryfkah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryfkah/gifts).



> hello ryfkah! i hadn't revisted this series in years, but i stumbled upon your letter, succumbed to curiosity about alleged Ran-Botan interaction, and promptly lost all sense of restraint and peace of mind until i could bang this out in homage to our favorite lesbian architect and her BEAUTIFULLY CONCLUDED character arc that left me absolutely verklempt. so thank you very much for prompting me to go back to this perennial fave (AND having written postcanon fic i am looking forward to after inevitable post-yuletide reread of the entire canon!)
> 
> this fic is canon-compliant up to the ants arc and veers AU after that point. it contains non-graphic, non-focal mentions of canon violence, character deaths, and trauma, as well as moderately explicit f/f sexual content.
> 
> side pairings present but backgrounded include Haru/Koruri, Ayu/Aramaki, and Chisa/Fujiko.
> 
> enjoy!
> 
> -
> 
> ETA 12/26: for no reason i can discern, this was accidentally deleted from the archive, so uploading it again--most cursed work in the history of yuletide! i'll be out of the country at the time of reveals, so i hope you'll see this--my apologies!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first time Ran actually met Nijiko had culminated in violence and teamwork with Summer A, so that was a wash, but the first time she met  _Nijiko_ , emphasis jigsawed around, she'd been shellacking the pages of the Ryugu shelter diary in the melted, resheeted vinyl she used for laminate, and knew she'd said something wrong only when Akane and Sakuya stopped playing the world's most morose game of hacky-sack in her hut to stare at her.

"What?" she said, and smoothed a bubble of air out over a page. It was the one where Mark and Maria rode to the mincer--great cautionary tale for Kurumi's burgeoning offspring, so basically, this was a samaritan act of administrative work. She wanted to throw pages everywhere like free drink flyers. 

"Excuse me, Ran-san," said Akane, more puzzled than distressed. "There were many things, um, wrong with Autumn Village, but I don't think the main problem was that it had no...shower...and Summer A's treehouse has one..."

"Definitely  _a_ problem," wheedled Sakuya. "Don't get me wrong."

"Oh yes,  _a_ problem," said Akane politely. "But--maybe the celibacy imposition and constant labor...? Never mind."

"Akane," said Ran. "Haven't you been wanting me to admit that place was a hellmouth since you deserted? Wasn't that the  _point_ of desertion?"

"Well, yes!" She sighed and snatched up the hacky-sack, contrite. "But--"

"So I'm making it up to everyone by offering to make a few more showers," said Ran. "Just a gesture." She waved the page to dry it and Sakuya glanced over approvingly, blanched, and sidled away. "Don't you think another shower would be an asset? Imagine how much more time that creepy giant kid could spend washing his hair out of our sight."

Akane brightened. "That's very true. I could get salt off my skin multiple times a week! And we could even go outside without feeling like--oh, god, he's over there. He's watching the--I'm going diving for a few...hours."

When she went outside Ryo was indeed watching the perimeter with his usual blandly murderous shine. He ignored her, so she stared at him openly until he was out of her sight. Striated in stripes of late-afternoon sunlight like honeybees, most of Summer A looked sedate and relatively genteel, which was a good reason to hate sunlight. She shaded her eyes and thought, not for the first time:  _sunglasses_ , which was why it was so irritating to finally come upon the poker-faced engineering intern making tape measures out of long peeled bark, her safety goggles painted over with a layer of sap precisely the amber shade of Ran's favorite pair of Sunpockets, mislaid at the Nagasaki metro terminal some--two hundred and five years ago at this point and no less water-under-the-bridge for it.

"Listen," she said to the intern, who wasn't  _really_ an intern but had the finely cultivated ennui of every enraging junior draftsman Ran had ever disdained and studiously never been in her life, and thus begged the moniker. "I see you're at work, so I'll keep it short, don't get up--"

"I wasn't getting up."

"...on my account. Were you the one who built the showers in the treehouse?"

Apocalyptic Career Builder folded her tape measure in half and began marking off centimeters with her handspan. "I'd hardly say they needed to be built, since anyone would think to put holes in a stick for water dispersion. But yes."

"Lovely." She marveled that generalized tyranny over a three-year period actually gave you a  _better_ handle on stonewalling teenage sullenness, so really, all the professors she'd ever known should have had some explaining to do. "That's selling them short, the water pressure randomization seems like more than just a stick with holes in it. I'd love a look."

Nijiko frowned through her ridiculous prison-bar bangs. "How did you know it randomizes water pressure?"

"I heard Ayu-san say so," Ran lied, because it was less soul-crushing than conceding she might have asked Akane to note the volume of water in a bath bucket, before-and-after, and dragged out some undergrad calculus to ascertain whether the Summer A girls had actually done womankind the service of getting massaging showerhead action out of a glorified flute. "Gonna tell kid Nobunaga out there?" She jerked a thumb indicating some location, likely sinister, where Ango was in best-case scenario under unimpressed covert supervision by Akio.

"Not a chance." It was said with such dispassion Ran wondered if she'd misheard the certainty. "Well, it's hard to mess up building showers, even for civilians."

She couldn't have intended it but Ran thought of the ash on Autumn Village anyway, how quickly the entire thing had gone up, and the way Izayoi had looked at her before he died--when an architect was in charge, the things that happened were design flaws, simple as that. 

But that was then and now the tree endlessly spreading branches of guilt and terror was whittled down to this single cool-eyed girl insulting her ability to do her job in the most banal, childish way, knowing she'd hit the nerve of an old tale but convinced there couldn't be anything to it she hadn't seen before. Ran suddenly felt like an intern herself again, and not a professional negligent who'd trapped half the people in the settlement in a bad blueprint for three years.

She folded her arms again, fingers along her bicep, every muscular pull from every accumulated day of that three-year labor. Hard to mess up building showers.   

"Civilian. Ran-san," Nijiko remembered. "If you're still interested, you don't need to ask my permission to take a bath in the treehouse. I don't know what gave you the impression I cared."

"I guess we've established we're just so terribly into extraneities, then, which is why we've wasted time on this conversation."

"That's fair." There wasn't a smile, but she did stow her tape measure with a certain encouraging haphazardness. "Come on, then. Bring something to write with. You don't need to hide doing differentials in front of me, I can help you." She didn't look smug at all, just bored, but just then she made the unexpected, age-appropriate mistake of forgetting herself mid-sass and setting the heel of her hand right in the sap on her goggles.

When she took it down, frowning, she devoted all her attention to the little stripe of lacquer. In the months since Ran sometimes came back to how her hands had looked in that inoffensive honey-colored sunlight: wire burn, puncture dots, a few pen-marks where she'd been using the side of her pinkie as a measuring aid, par for the course for any other engineer she'd ever seen. She'd been in the new world for three years and change and still woke up groping the mat or soil next to her for a phone with a text from her supervisor, missed the Nalgene she'd won in a firmwide raffle, fought for words to explain herself as, excised of industrial terminology, her new vocabulary of design went cloudy without warning. Hard not to remember how for a few moments that afternoon before they'd even looked at the showers--a shifting pattern of stones that randomized the water pressure!--Nijiko had made building ordinary again, the feeling echoing what they'd talked about. Points of pressure shifting, one more layer this place had built up freed, with efficiency, not gone, but rinsed a little loose.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Playing house with the motley crew of murderers and savants known as Summer A was like watching a movie with a bunch of laser-eyed pedants who didn't have any particular investment in the plot or moments of emotional significance but would talk over the dialogue for hours about the historical accuracy of corset stays or the type of rushgrass in the mise-en-scene. Despite the fact that they complained about "civilian" noise levels whenever anyone did something like sing, laugh, or end a sentence with a question mark, at any given moment the settlement rang with clear, imperious tones declaiming astonishing opinions on beverages ("Attention, civilians: all teas brewed recreationally must now contain at least three to four medicinal properties per hour wasted in consumption _"_ ), musical endeavors ("Excuse me, Haru-san, but she knows eighteen songs now, how many more are left?"), and cuisine ("Of course it's flavored, I poured the dishwater over it, didn't I?"). None of this was the most frustrating aspect-- _that_ was the fact that Ran was apparently the only person for whom this posed a barrier to cross-pollination.

Ayu and Aramaki spent hours together having sexually loaded circle-of-life conversations neither of them realized were sexually loaded while caressing bark covered in deadly fungus and staring into one another's eyes. After discovering Guri and Gura were Akane's responsibility Gengoro politely wrapped their dung in wide leaves and left it at their doorstep for her to analyze at her leisure. Haru and Koruri had cobbled together three recorder/charcoal organ duets and taken to swapping shoulders in shadowy corners of the settlement batting things like "No,  _your_ eyes are rounder" back and forth like the most well-adjusted annoying teenagers in love on the face of the planet.

Hana stayed rightfully ambivalent on the entire concept of Summer A and was the only person on Ran's wavelength anymore, which was why she ended up spending so much time in Ran's extension, folding and refolding laundry. The bones grew more and more agitatedly prominent in the backs of her hands.

"But you and Nijiko-san are getting along pretty well, right," she said, in one of her bright-eyed bushy-tailed poorly-disguised-fury-fuel visits, wherein Hana radiated steely camaraderie and Ran was left sleepless after, remembering the times Kurumi and Akane had dropped in the same way, in the first weeks of Autumn's arrival, cold frost-starred fields, days of dull rage and a panicked, bitter hunger that matched the taste in the sooty air back then, told her she could survive here. 

But that was before, and by karma or simple adaptation they hadn't come to her like that since. Design flaws, the works. Nobody set foot in the same bad blueprint twice.

"She doesn't talk much, but I bet that suits you for another--professional," Hana bushwhacked on through the silence. Ran was elusively grateful to her then, the way she'd been when Nijiko had sized her up so rudely. "I could probably stand to pick up a few things. But don’t architects and engineers have some kind of partnership thing or..."

“Watch the end of that sentence, there.”

“Rivalry?”

“Good.”

“Implicit agreement on the superiority of architects--”

“Better.”

She laughed heartily like someone who hadn’t only a week ago been under the impression Ran had extensive familiarity with turf wars. From the corner Kurumi and Akane glanced at them and then away in a way that made Ran’s stomach turn. It’s safe now, she thought inappropriately of saying, or: I know what you need this time.

Or even more inappropriately: this doesn’t change anything, I feel the same way.

"Anyway, she talks all the time," she said darkly. "She can rehash the same thing ten, twenty times in a row without breathing, she's like a human flashcard. And the  _questions_ \--pries and pries."

Hana’s encouraging sunny expression capsized into an even more encouraging mutinous glower. “Don't tell her anything!” She could only fake locker-room chatter for so long before the part of her Ran was coming to like best resurfaced--that exposed nerve of instinct; could stand to pick up a few things; wouldn't do it. "I'm counting on you to learn as much about her as you can, O-Ran-san!"

But all Ran managed to learn about her so-called new engineer in the first week was that she did her hair by sweeping her hand through it like a teen idol, and then letting the long locks dangle like antennae until one of her teammates handed her a bandanna out of seeming telepathy. She stood and sat like a linebacker who had suffered an injury, knees apart, shoulders challenging, gaze sliding down anything to puddle on the floor while someone, usually Ango, entreated her with something allegedly motivational. But even in the day and age they'd left she wouldn't have been anyone's bet to win the big game, get the girl, take home the trophy. She didn't like raised voices or even arguments, she wasn't frightened of them, she just conveniently excised them from her portion of the universe.

Presumably because of this, she'd never learned how to have one. "Didn't you hear me?" said Ran flatly after the twelfth time she'd repeated herself. They were outside the mouth of the underground river, silt in their shoes, making up a quota to the last dregs of one of the lavender sunsets draining away in the southwest quadrant of the sky. "Why are you still cutting paddles? We're not making a water wheel."

"How do you know I'm cutting paddles," said Nijiko, planing another board neatly and dropping the paddle into a crate labelled PADDLES (NONWEAPONIZED). "Water wheels raise water to a higher elevation so that it can be siphoned or redirected to a reservoir for filtration. There are plenty of chances for elevation, as the paddles always circle back around."

Ran was drawing a ventilation system on a piece of birchbark with one of her precious Razorpoints and accidentally gouged a spike in one of the immaculate ducts. "Nijiko-san, did you just explain to me what a water wheel was?"

"I don't mind repeating myself."

"I've known what a water wheel was since I was eight. Don't do that again."

Nijiko glanced at her absently over the top of a board, like she was nothing more than an extension of the landscape, not a useful one at that. "Then you understand why we need one, so there's no further need to be talking about this." She drew her safety goggles back down and went on planing. "Eight is late. Is that standard for civilians?"

Ran capped the Razorpoint, set it down, and sloshed into the river to get back inside the cave for a moment, inside the cool dark. When she came out Nijiko had unscrewed the top off the pen. In front of Ran's eyes she removed the ink cartridge and begun stabbing the nib purposely against one of the wet rocks where she sat.

Ran stalked up to her, put her hand on Nijiko's shoulder, and retrieved the pen as though pulling up something that had rooted. "Listen." She wouldn't snap, not at a serene eighteen-year-old who'd never built--possibly never seen a building aside from her own institute in her life. "An engineer who's never even used a drafting pen shouldn't be lecturing anyone on how to build."

Nijiko examined the pen impassively. "It's sharp--I wanted to test if it would make a better fine-point chisel. Why don't you use--"

"Graphite pencils like the rest of you do?" That earned a flicker of interest. "No thank you. Use what you'd like, I don't let people without experience dictate how I do my job and that's not going to change."

Nijiko's eyes slid to Ran's, arms folding hiding her hands from view. On anyone else it would have looked combative but as she did it there was nothing decipherable about the posture at all. Too late, Ran thought of the ordinariness of those sun-dappled hands, the stupid serenity they'd lured her into so she hadn't noticed how engaged they were already in the process of measuring, assessing. Their exactitude over the places things came up short.

"Is that what happened at Autumn Village?"

For a moment she thought she'd heard wrongly. She was standing in five centimeters of brackish water that sucked at her ankles and she'd never been more dumbfounded in her life. "What?"

"Is that how you ruined Autumn Village. I didn't know the details, so I'm piecing it together myself."

"Okay, then." She wouldn't snap. "I'm--here. Take this," she rolled up the birch drawing, secured it with her hairband, and threw it at Nijiko's feet, "and this," she tossed the pen, "and you do the ventilation yourself for the treehouse, build that waterwheel, whatever you'd like. I'll finish the extension myself and I'll dig the trench I was trying to explain to you. My team will work construction shifts for me, so you'll want to ask one of your friends to help you out--excuse me, one of your teammates, unless you know how to do that one-man too and that's just another thing you've been keeping to yourself."

"Ran-san." StiIl courteous, or uncaring enough to approximate it. "Is it what I asked? I wasn't aware the subject was off-limits."

"You'd like to know about Autumn Village?" She was opening and closing her fingers. She wasn’t that conscientious, gullible girl in her lab anymore, Kurumi and Akane had stopped coming to her; Hana only came because Hana could bear anything and this girl--this girl could bear more than she could. "It was a better settlement than this will ever be. I earned my entire team's hatred to build it and I watched it burned to the ground, I didn't even  _want_ it, I wanted things to keep going on the way they were forever, but I let go because your teammate killed mine. And now wherever I go I'll have to do better next time, for Izayoi-san and for what happened there. But you--you've trained your whole life, you've wanted  _this_ your whole life, and you'll never do better than this because you'll want things to be done the same way until the day you die. So no, it's not because of Autumn Village. It's because I can't afford to build with the kind of people who'd destroy it all over again."

She only knew Nijiko had been listening to the entire thing because she unfolded herself, unequivocal as a depressed key, on the last word, hands in the pockets of her track pants.

Suddenly the impervious apathy that had deflected them all seemed only a shade and a muscle flicker from exhaustion, the lacquer inkiness of her pupils, her hair, the dark bow of her mouth in sunset chiaoscuro. She didn't look bored in the pulsating dark that encroached; she looked like someone who had had a natural caution confirmed.

She retrieved the pen from the lapping water at her feet and placed it politely on the rock, next to the birch drawing. Then she trudged back in the direction of the treehouse. After a few minutes Ran followed. It wasn't until two days later that Ryo spotted Hana's knife and they all learned what Nijiko had already known when they'd talked: that they were seventeen years too late and again--again and fucking again--Ran had miscalculated what someone needed of her, but it was different this time, the bad blueprint more inexcusable because it should have been so obvious. She had, after all, been talking to someone else who'd already come to terms, laid out the groundwork of those interminable questions, with the idea that everything she'd worked for might be useless.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Things didn't take a turn for the noticeably more awkward over the next few days, but since that was because they'd already been fatally awkward to begin with that was hardly an indicator of anything. She still showed up to the Summer A treehouse every day to stare Ango down placidly until Nijiko came out--never oversleeping, like any of them, but always a little more languid. It was the only trait she actually shared with the intern Ran was now wholly incapable of seeing her as again, even if she still carried Nijiko's water-wheel frame to the river every day like some crotchety contracting supervisor, and even if Nijiko still didn't modulate the tone or nature of her disinterested, impractical design stipulations.

The only things that disappeared were the questions. So on the third day of this Ran packed herself a set of the battery-powered levels she'd used sparingly over the last three years, all of which had only come into use since her last year of design school, and waited until they were in the rivermouth shining flashlights into the rocks below before curling her toes in the rocky silt under the current, bracing herself, and calling, "Nijiko-san, my bag's right next to you--hand me my digital level?"

The levels looked identical to the other digital tools, just flat pen-sized sticks with numerical displays, the painted names worn off. Nijiko picked each one up for a moment, holding them in her hands. She found the spirit level finally, the analogue version of the tool, with its familiar bubble, that she must have been used to. She looked at it for a long time, apparently fighting the urge to hand it over.

Then she put all the tools back in the bag and came back into the water. It was a different kind of silence she'd wrapped about herself now. She opened her hand, and Ran saw the spirit level in it. Nijiko's eyes as dark and uncurious as ink but there was something there anyway, in the way she exposed her palm, some hoarded defiance.

Ran felt the water sweeping past her ankles. It was cold, and it would be colder before the day wore on, so she scrubbed a hand through her hair, thought properly about what she was doing. Low diffused light coming in the color of a new bruise.

"Thanks," she said finally, and took the level, as though it was the one she'd asked for in the first place.

The next morning Nijiko was already waiting down at the Autumn/Spring hut, her hair wet, ignoring Hana's enthusiastically offered bandanna until Hana slid her eyes to Ran, gave up caution in an instinct, and leapt at her bodily to tie it on herself, nearly but not quite throwing Nijiko and her perfect reflexes off balance. Ran tugged on her pigtail as they went past for her trouble and Hana looked so cautiously delighted it took her a moment to remember they didn't do that sort of thing. 

Well, apparently they did, she thought later, goggles on, situating the spirit level at ground level under the current, limbs unknotted and cool under the iron-tasting flow. Any more of this and Hana was going to start painting her nails and introducing her to the dreaded and legendary tousle-haired boyfriend. When she came up out of the water Nijiko was sitting cross-legged on the rocks, flashlight in her mouth. Sorting through the set of levels, each marked now, with name and function, in Razorpoint pen.

She glanced at Ran. Her slouch was awful as usual and Ran wanted to go to her, feel if the linebacker shoulders actually held any tension, palm a spine she realized she'd already come to imagine like the water undulating gently at her collarbones, not graceful, but imbued with its own supple, mappable mechanics.

Nijiko held one out. The low light of the water, the flashlight's mechanical gleam dispersed and portioned across planes of rock, simmered in miniature in her eyes.

She held the level not like a blade, like Ran had expected, but more like a toothbrush.

"Why do you need this?" she asked, toneless. "Are you able to explain this to me?"

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

And then she began to learn things, one after another. Her engineer didn't smile, but predictably expanded the parameters of her curiosity or approval or finely pointillated interest in a way that made it, first a little and then a lot easy to be around her, this woman who had calmly assembled her own self without extraneities and requested nothing more from anyone else, which made you want to give it to her. In the hut reading the Ryugu diary Ran read Maria tell Mark,  _We are people who have lived our lives in complete control of our mind and body_  and barked a laugh, startling Akane; it could have been a love letter, or an autopsy report.   

She designed like the only thing anyone in the settlement would ever need was water and it was perfectly acceptable to starve to death or be eaten by any passing bat pack as long as they were safely hydrated while doing so. She and Ryo periodically picked over the leftovers of an inexplicable relationship in which they would skulk around like bottom-feeding seacreatures for hours in total silence and then laugh and say something like, "As expected, you still don't know when to shut up." 

She was never jovial or encouraging, she was never moody or vindictive. She wouldn't celebrate and she wouldn't grieve. She was like the lay of the current or the fixed firm press of the stony ground, nothing personal in the vector you drew from that surface to your own doomed and oscillating struggle to stay upright. When she was certain she was correct she treated Ran like someone with no experience at all, let alone the damning failed cairn of Autumn Village that still cast its long shadow, and so, at intervals, Ran felt herself became that newborn person, that bad blueprint wiped clean with the receding and advancing current. All the instability of history not erased, not forgiven, only submerged for the moment beneath churning water like the ruins that surrounded them for thousands of kilometers in every possible direction. Nothing to do but build as if the world had always been a blank slate.

She was so passively irritating she couldn't even intimidate with proficiency like Ayu did with her charged, active flavor of disdain, so people like Ryusei and Sakuya routinely felt the need to goad her with questions like "How many legs does this six-legged beetle have?" and "Hey Nijiko-san, if it rains, is that water class or wind?" If Nijiko tolerated Ran, it was only because she asked for what she needed and not what she felt entitled to. Nijiko was a person constantly beleaguered for things she hadn't consented to give by any means but being a woman alive, smiles, attention, a certain profusion of reaction, and Ran could get behind that, always. No need to indulge people who asked things of you with any more than the bare minimum, else you'd keep getting asked. Else you'd keep giving, and one day, years later, you'd wake up--

Years later. You'd wake up.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

"Say, today, Ryo told me you killed your guide."

"Haha..."

"Faking a laugh isn't going to convince me it's a joke."

"I see. Oh, well. It was an interesting incident."

"...Is that so."

"It was a bit shameful. We didn't think of even--"

"I actually don't want to know--"

"--putting safety goggles on, so--"

 "I  _don't want to know_ , good god. But...yes. Put them on, now that you mention it. And...have another look at this join, this is what I was talking about."

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

One afternoon after yoga she spotted Ban escorting Kurumi back to the extension hut; she’d been outside rethatching roofwork after a rainshower and hadn’t seen them until they’d already ducked inside. “--wasn’t alarmed at all when I was late,” Kurumi was telling him, taking out a tin of acorns Akane kept and thumbing them apart, offering him some in the lid of a jar, just a gesture, but it made his cheeks pinken. “I'd always wanted to be married, but other than that...I was happy to find out, actually, it--I felt less alone.”

Sweat poured down Ran’s hair, the back of her neck, pooling in the hollows under her shoulderblades. She felt the cracked-yolk sizzle of the sun, the straw beneath her fingers, all of her bristling against what she touched. From the far side of the roof Akio was humming an old mambo standard he'd told her had been the first Spanish song he'd heard on repeat to swallow the accent. _Oye como va--mi ritmo--_ It was a danceable song and she'd never been much of a dancer, but In the first days of Autumn Village they'd both sung it in that perfect accent, joylessly, to keep in practice.

_We lived together with our loved ones, doing what we loved, until the end_ , Mark had written in the diary,  _it was hardly a fate to be pitied._ When she'd read it, she'd thought: fuck you, we know you had the good life--who's pitying you?

She pulled herself to a higher vantage point. It seemed impossible in this heat that it had rained only the night before. Now her handiwork was the only evidence. She plugged the leak, as though against the hum of voices below. She climbed higher.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

By the next month the bottom of the reservoir had deepened enough that they struck a layer of reddened soil. The rest of the group had gone out to scout at a peat watering hole, so they took a break to dig out the silky, clean-scented clay. “Pots,” Ran directed, pointing at one of the wheelbarrows, “freeform utensils, refrigeration urn--Hana wanted a facepack, maybe set some aside for the others too--”

“No. This is for bricks." Not wanting to stain her track jacket, Nijiko had put on one of Ryo’s clean t-shirts, knotted at her midsection, and her safety sunglasses; she looked three piercings and a pair of bleached pedal pushers away from an Akihabara girl group. “Someone can put a brick on their face if they want,” she conceded.

“Facepacks aren’t for--” If you started having these conversations with her you’d never stop. “What do you want with bricks?”

“A brick is a unitary building material usually made of clay and straw, fired into a stackable shape.” She was managing a remarkable imitation of patience she didn’t actually have. This imitation was usually dragged out when she was going for a special degree of condescension, which had led Ran to develop an instinctive distaste for the entire notion of patience. She slapped a shovelful of clay into the pots wheelbarrow anyway, sublimating her irritation into a nice smooth pinkish layer.

“I know what a brick is, thanks. But villages don’t really last long enough here to spend the time...you haven’t been here long, so maybe you don’t know. I don’t mean that unkindly. I appreciate that you take advice from your seniors.”

“I would if there were any here.” Ran smiled. “Ran-san, you don’t want to build a permanent settlement.”

A vision shored up in her with startling, panoramic clarity: a great redbrick hall, long floor-to-ceiling windows, entrenched foundation. She hadn’t spoken to half the people in the settlement but she could see Ayu weeding a central courtyard with her sleeves pushed up to her elbows, Akane kneeling on a patio to shuck off her wet diving clothes, Akio napping in the shade of a cool ceramic tiled roof. Stairs for Kurumi to step down carefully, one hand on a safe railing. She’d been doing one building-adjacent task or another with Nijiko long enough by now that she realized it surprised her that Nijiko couldn’t see the image, that she wouldn’t know something this basic about Ran.

“That’s not it at all,” she said slowly. “I’d--I want to build a permanent settlement. But we can’t do it right now, it’s just a low return on efficiency to plan for anything long-term.”

“I planned for this reservoir. Isn’t it long-term?”

“No, that’s not what I mean. You’ve never seen the kind of things people used to build in...” She scrubbed her wrist across her forehead waiting in dread for the old anger and felt cool clay rub off instead, easing the tension at her temples a little, keeping it at bay. “Come on, let’s take a break.”

“Had enough, have you.”

"I've always had enough of you." It came out distressingly fond; she cringed. 

Nijiko took off Ryo’s shirt to spread it on the floor and lay back in her thin undershirt. Ran reflected meanly that it was a wonder she didn’t know what a facepack was; her skin was dewy, the color of the inside of a seashell where she bent her head to expose the back of her neck to the violet-colored shade, the sheer cloudless arch of the blue sky over the lip of the reservoir. When Ran realized she was checking her out she took refuge in a surreal anachronistic image of Nijiko with cucumber slices over her eyes, before she remembered her fanaticism about safety goggles and realized the skin thing was probably more likely a result of drinking something like twenty-five bottles of water a day and being utterly unaffected by occupational stress about murder, dying of plague, et al.

“You’re good at this,” she said abruptly, and set her head back against the soil wall. “I know some of you--Koruri, and all--worry about this, but you were the right person to pick to come here.”

When she opened her eyes Nijiko was studying her cautiously. “Yes, but it hardly sounds positive from you.”

She smiled. “You got me.” For once Nijiko was waiting for further elaboration. “I mean--you don’t want to build more than what we can, you probably couldn’t hold a grudge if you tried. That’s the way to live now.”

“I want to build my waterwheel,” said Nijiko, almost experimentally; she didn’t sound like it mattered to her either way. It made Ran feel like a child throwing stones into a deep well, the surface untroubled and you wanted to throw further, elicit skips and ripples, disturb it as you could, reassured you wouldn’t perturb its unstirrable depths. Something that wouldn’t move allowed you to throw yourself against it as hard as you wanted. “What did you want to build?”

She’d been surprised she hadn’t known before, but she was surprised she asked at all now. “I used to be a commercial architect. I was training to do public spaces--I guess you wouldn’t have seen them. Courtyards, malls, airports--”

“Gathering halls. You forget I grew up in an institute. I’m sure it was designers in your profession who built it.”

This was true, and she’d been thinking of government construction she hadn't had a chance to participate in since the Ryugu diary; for the first time since reading it she was glad she hadn’t been involved. “Right. Our profession.”

“Like in Ryugu.” It took her a moment to realize Nijiko was cross-referencing, in her usual unaffected way, the last place she’d heard the word, when Maria had walked into the freezer and shut the door behind herself using this as the justification that had survived, immortalized in ink, into the future. “You think I have a profession...because I want to build my waterwheel.”

“The word is engineer.” It’d been meant as a joke, but they’d come out somewhere different. “It’s--they work with architects all the time. You’re as annoying of one as any I’ve ever worked with. More annoying, even.”

"So architecture is a watered-down version of engineering--"

"See, you've got the hang of it already." 

“We were made for civilians.” Nijiko put her hands behind her head. “We were the long-term investment. Ryo has it backward." She didn't know how you could graduate from 'the general population was created to be our slaves' to an even more wretched opinion on the subject, but Summer A was just constantly ahead of the game with their ability to keep it fresh. "So, I would hope so.”

“Not like a tool, you--more like a partner.”

“That sounds horrible.”

“Ha! Preaching to the choir.”

They had a few moments of cool, near-companionable detente, listening to a breeze whistle over the top of the reservoir, the bones of the earth thrumming behind the soft crowns of their skulls. 

"There weren't engineers in the Ryugu shelter," muttered Nijiko.

"Well...they weren't mentioned, no. But the screens, the rooms--they built those, and those people were comfortable. So you know they were there, and did their jobs right." The diary was in her bag. Feeling foolish, she flipped it to one of the sections she'd reread again and again--a long description of the weather settings and the way individual stores shared lighting with them--and began to read out loud.

"I've read this."

"I know that. Shut up."

Nijiko stared at her for several unnerving moments, then lay her head down, a blade of hair bisecting her cheekbone. Flat eyes permissive: go on, then. So Ran did. They were both tired here, waiting. The air here in the reservoir had the stillness of the water that would fill it. After a while she set the book in her lap and they didn't speak at all. 

“You asked about what went wrong at Autumn Village,” she said, finally, looking not at Nijiko’s eyes but the pearly skin of her jaw, lifted to assess the height of the sun. "So now you know. I was angry because I wanted something. I kept wanting it instead of walking away. It’s not more complicated than that.”

She thought for no reason of the girl from Summer B, fresh from the old world, more terrified and incompetent than any junior draftsman Ran had ever had but she’d been unequivocal in her look of pity when she’d looked at Ran. There’d been disgust in that gaze. “And I lost people for that. But you know what the worst part is? I'm not sure I wouldn't make the same choice again, if I had to. If there were something else I wanted as much as my life there."

"Why are you telling me this?" She looked pained by what might have resembled emotion; Ran felt a little lighter at the sight of her mouth making its downward moue. "You gave it so much power over you, of course I won't understand."

"That's true. Maybe if you'd been there you'd have--executed me, or something."

"That's a lot of work. But Ryo owes me one."

"Ryo gives me the creeps, so no thank you."

"It doesn't matter. You'd be dead." She considered. "Only one person Ryo's tried to kill has actually ended up dead. But you'd have a fair chance."

"You can't count that clinical trial because of the low usage of safety goggles."

She was laughing; she couldn't help it. It took her a moment to identify the sound and then she felt ridiculous.  But Nijiko had her eyes closed, cheek pillowed on her knuckles. The whorl of her hair looked like an unfurling bouquet, some girl's old thing that might be tied with a ribbon and tossed out over an unmade bed. Ran expected it to have the same softness when she touched it but it didn't, it was like wire. You thought of sterilization, but a heavy-lifting, powerful iteration. You thought of standing at a pipe and scrubbing away with steel wool until the bright metal flashed out clean.

"Enjoying your bedtime story?"

"Mm."

"How would you execute me, if you had to?"

"Faking a laugh isn't going to convince me it's a joke," quoted Nijiko pedantically, but she turned over and studied her peaceably anyway so she was clearly full of shit. Then she reached up and set her hand on Ran's cheek. Her long fingers surveyed the cheekbone, the swell of her bottom lip. 

The walls of the reservoir enfolded them the way wroughtwork steadied stained glass, the long parallelograms of light passing through it, shivering, held. Pale accidental mouth, fine, disinterested eyes. Ran bent closer to her; she remembered a story she'd read in her English cram school grammar: Narcissus bending into his reflection. Overcome by the need to touch.

Then Nijiko took her hand back, unfurled her palm clinically, and showed Ran the slash of red clay. 

"The brick on face you were mentioning sounds good...will you show me?" 

"Please. If anyone could kill someone with a skincare product, I'd have my money on you already."

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

They fell asleep there, in the shade of the reservoir, and were awakened by a sharp semicircular shadow cutting across their face. Ran looked up. Haru was peering imperiously into the reservoir, fluffing the hair away from the back of his neck. 

"Excuse me, O-Ran-san, could you please come up here instead of slacking off? Koruri, they're slacking off." Her head appeared next to his in the circle of blue sky. 

"That's okay, Haru."

"Is it okay?"

"It's okay."

"I just wanted you to know in case it wasn't okay."

"But it's okay." She waved at Nijiko and called, "Unusual advection fog at the treeline, I put out vinyl for water runoff. I'm seeing an evaporation system. Want a look? I'll fly you."

"But you have to wear a shirt," called Haru jealously to Nijiko, then caught Ran's eye. "Because it's...cold at the treeline."

"Haru, when have you ever been there?" said Koruri, seemingly grave, eyes dancing. "Would you like--"

"Yes," said Haru, with ardent immediacy. "Absolutely. I was about to suggest it. Yes. Anything. Don't you think it's interesting how we think of the same things?" 

Nijiko put Ryo's shirt back on, dusted it off, and zipped her track jacket on over it. Ran felt a deranged urge to ask her if she'd had a nice time and then thought of Haru fluffing his hair and backtracked away from self-hating teenagerdom in dismay. Nijiko hung her sunglasses on her collar. Before they tugged on the rope ladder to come up out of the reservoir she took Ran's shirt between her thumb and forefinger so she turned back. 

"If you think that was what ruined Autumn Village, you have an inflated sense of your own self-importance, as always," she said, as though she'd been saving up her daily quota of words for days to say it. Ran lifted an eyebrow and brushed her hand away but her gaze was already far away, a dreamy, distant chill suffusing her voice. “You can do that by not wanting anything, as well.”

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

Spring, in their new days, seemed to have showed their youth through courtesy--honorifics all the time, letting their oldest and youngest members have first priority for meals and first aid in a habit that persisted even when Haru, Hana, and Momota came to eat with the rest of them. Autumn had been full of successful but anonymous bootstrappers--Ryusei's nouveau-riche family, Akane's ama grandmother who lived a stone's throw from the pearl-diver World Heritage Site in Mie, Kurumi and Akio's shared memories of cram school via correspondence course--but Spring's children had obviously received the most calibrated suburban childhood possible and wore this like shoes with an inappropriate heel even now, present in things from the way Hana said "Arashi and I had the most ordinary courtship in the world" to the way Haru used Nijiko's sap-on-surface trick to lint-roll leaves off his woven sweater. Koshien! starter! Aramaki! Takahiro! uttered in a more and more breathless voice every time grew tiresome quickly and left no doubt as to what Winter's roster of Traditional Arts celebrities had been like, but the actual person had had the edges worn off by fifteen years in anonymity, and once as they all lay in their sleeping bags invited Ran and Akio, practicing English conversation, to lie near him, and sheepishly rattled off the first of some twenty-five American Major League games telecast in English that he'd memorized as a middle schooler to copy pitch leads. 

She slowly became conscious of a vague regret that they hadn't talked more with Summer B. The girl they'd met, upon seeing them in their village, had muttered, "Anywhere there are human beings..." The more they stayed in the combined settlement, the clearer it became that there had never been a blank slate to begin with. 

But one afternoon she walked to the Summer A treehouse to hand the diary over to Nijiko for her reading and took the rope ladder up to the gazebo. They were all sitting around their fire, oddly on the floor instead of their benches, as though at a sleepover. From their position on the floor they couldn't see her behind the woven reed curtain.

"I thought Wabun Morse," Gengoro was saying, "but I worked out a vague system of concordances and it didn't seem to go."

"I'm told Team Autumn often spent months in a drug-induced stupor," Ayu said, making Ran lift an eyebrow, "so I think it's probably an effect of that. I think we should all acquire pampas grass to see if we might replicate it."

"We should rather entrap them in a situation wherein they will be forced to replicate it, believing it was of their own free will, and then reveal its true purpose to us," intoned Ryo. "Botany is complex and I would prefer a simpler tool like panopticon conditioning...Nijiko, what do you think?"

"Abstain," said Nijiko. 

"Do it again, Koruri," said Ban. She fluffed back her hair the way Haru did.

"Oye como va," she sang, in a clear, conscientious voice, "mi ritmo--bueno para gozar--"

She and Akio had sung it in the same kind of dutiful haze but Koruri had a better sense of it as music, already moved her shoulders lightly to its ebb and flow. She only knew the first two verses by heart and she looped them with no selfconsciousness. One by one, they set down their mirrors, notebooks, water bottles, pencils, sheaves of birchbark paper, and looked at her swaying shoulders. Their fingers pianoed softly on the wood, uncertain. Ran wondered apropos of nothing what kind of dancers they might have been.

Finally Ban said, "I can hear you're having some trouble with that--hard--r sound--"

"It has a rhythm," said Ayu, "and you're getting better every time you practice."

"There isn't much we need to practice," said Nijiko.

Ryo said, "It's our first time hearing it...but I think this might be what they call another language."

They were silent. Upon hearing this Gengoro had fixed something in his Wabun notes and now flashed it out by mirror.

"Call it a vote?" he said. "Although--I trust you all." Such startled pleasure in the words. Ran closed her eyes.

They voted. They Morsed it, watched the lyrics flicker in long, angular shards of light in the canopy overhead instead of reading their notebooks. "You're going to start a fire," said Ayu, but added her own cautious, lovely reflection to the little tumult of mirrors. They sat with their hands open, decoding tools forgotten around them; it was impossible not to wonder what they were remembering.

Then--Ran would never remember who started it first--they began to try all at once. Ban put his hand on Koruri's throat to feel the vibrations and she giggled, sending the song into a higher pitch and prompting Gengoro and Ayu into a flutter of key changes. Ango hadn't lost the habit of shouting but his voice when it finally emerged sounded hoarse with disuse, "Oye c-como va. Mi ritmo--" Nijiko only hummed, following the tentative streamers of her classmates' singing, so that when the song finally left her throat, it was fully formed as though she'd been doing it all her life.

They sang nakedly, in skips and stops, their shoulders moving. Their own voices wove a light, strong web about them. Ran let the curtain drop and stepped back. Listen to how it goes, said Akio, translating in her mind, the first time in the new world she'd felt less alone. My rhythm, it's good. It's good for feeling good.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

What she wanted to show Nijiko was what stained glass looked like--why she wouldn't have been able to leave Autumn Village if they'd gotten to the point where she'd put windows into the buildings. Glasswork was practical but it was more than that, it conveyed a commitment to living in a home that was beautiful.

As an intern she’d spent a semester in Goa doing French doors for churches and the Portuguese-inflected Indian political halls there--glass and wroughtwork, the sea there a line of copper-green yarn against monsoon clouds, and she'd watched the sun go down shimmering in her dye vats day after day, scoring lines a millimeter at a time along the surfaces, smoothing the shavings like sand away and then holding the planes to light thinking only of people going in and out and finding something beautiful, nothing that needed to be stronger than that. The prismatic light dispersed across the water and pouring through limpid, rosy glass. For months after she got back she couldn’t look at the lucky seashells of her hometown without thinking of the promise of that long-ago sea. When she’d held up the glass, filled with a somber, admiring regard, she’d shifted the uncut sheet, and then she’d seen the reflection of her own face in the most beautiful thing she’d ever laid eyes on. 

She’d been that girl, trusting the world not to let those centimeters of glass shatter in their frames, trusting in the future ahead of her to let her keep making things like that until the day she died. At Autumn Village she’d been methodical in flagellating that girl out of her own body, coughed her up with the drugs, beat her free with the switches, exposed her for castigation to the elements until she’d seen in the eyes of her teammates that she was something different and that girl was safely dead where she belonged. But now she’d come to this new place where Nijiko looked at her unafraid with her deep-water eyes and chipped clay for facepacks, and that girl tapped on her door again, said with no less anger than the new one, let me out, let me take a look, and Ran had to push the ghost down into the reservoir so that she’d drown and the unmanageable landscape of her rage would never resurface again for her to wreck them all upon.

Autumn Village had survived in spite of that girl, not because of her. In the end she’d done what she wanted and spited her only purpose on this earth, and she had nothing to show for it now but red clay under her fingernails, a slow submersion under water to cool her anger, hide her own failures from sight. The world had drowned; all those old edifices had disintegrated. Only her grudge left to her as proof that she’d ever had any of it in her hands, been one of those people like the Ryugu performers, the unseen engineers, who had made others feel safe. Done splendidly. 

 

 

 

**~**

 

 

 

 

 

“What did you do? At your test?”

“Nothing.”

"Well, you don't have to answer if you don't want--"

"I answered."

"Oh."

"I don't go back."

“I see...good policy.” 

"Why do you ask?"

"I didn't think you'd say if you weren't asked."

"You don't have to answer if you don't want to."

"Why, you--"

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Days slipped past, golden as water droplets in the honeyed sunshine. Hana begged them to go into the forest with Haru and Koruri after the attempt on his life, so they packed up their math and did a day of dimension scaling with their feet--or Ran's, at least--propped up in the dappled glade where the happiest people in camp played music and carved utensils and worked on Koruri's map. Nijiko said something helpful like "I don't see how attempted murder is more important than measuring the salinity of the river mud," but Koruri was apparently used to this and walked ahead with her, going over cartography in a pleasant voice.

When their two heads bent over the map she glanced up and scrubbed a bit of dirt off the white vinyl of Nijiko's collar with an absent fondness that made Ran remember, abruptly, that they'd been children together, seen each other always as constants in the landscape. Summer A had many faults but when one of them spoke they all gathered around in an unquestioning way like a drawstring pulling shut. Autumn, she thought absently, hadn’t gathered around like that since Izayoi, but there wasn’t an evil big enough now to press them all together like that again, not with that level of trust.

"Nijiko-san and Ryo-san always got along with Koruri at school," drawled Haru with the air of a young bridegroom discussing mildly eccentric in-laws, as if he knew what Ran had been thinking and "school" and “Ryo-san” were considerably less sinister than they actually were. She found it concerning that he didn't seem bothered either that he'd been brained and half-drowned in a swamp or that the entirety of their team had promptly started treating him like a kid brother who needed to be chaperoned at the school dance. Clearly there was something to be said for the resilience of prodigy savants. "Koruri says she even informed Nijiko-san about venereal diseases, because she skipped class on that day and--"

"I'm also all right if we don't talk," said Ran, pained by the unceasing flow of teen gossip and the shards of light needling about in his boyband hair. He flashed her a prettily condescending glance and went to go help Koruri with her recorder.

"--stage fright," he was saying when she looked up an hour or so later. They spoke like this to each other, picking up conversations no one had started. "My hands used to shake. It was humiliating! I don't think anyone gets over it."

"It's the nice thing about music," Koruri said, "I didn't realize until I met you. You get to do the same song over and over until you get it right. You keep going back to the same place until you make it through."

"And you will," said Haru, with a gravity that transformed him briefly into the austere charcoal figure, sheathed in silk, that he used to be when he appeared in the Asahi Shinbun of her middle-school years. But the moment passed and then he was just a besotted kid with a grating voice again, the tempo of his imaginary conducting spiking with delight as Koruri glanced at him. "Your eyes--close them, it helps."

She was a terrible student; didn't close her eyes, only stared at him with her bright merry focus until he giggled and looked away. She giggled back, said, "I think...it feels worse making the same mistakes again than making a new one, that's why you don't get over it," spreading her fingers wide and then setting them back down on her recorder, lost in her own thoughts. "Why is that the same, no matter what you do."

"Where you go."

"Who you're with."

"Well, maybe that one is different, that's what I think anyway. Now, at least."

"That's true, it didn't feel bad...when you knew I had trouble with landing. Whoa!" She set the recorder over her heart like a roller coaster safety bar and stared at him. "For a moment there, you looked kind of really saucer-eyed! Say that again so I can remember it." He set his stick behind his ear, reeled her in and said it again into the shell of her ear; she wrenched her eyes shut, as though her delight would spill. She assured him she'd remember.

"Very nice," said Nijiko in a tone of voice that implied the opposite. "I wonder if Ryo would cry tears if he saw this." This was so absurd Ran had to set her notebook down and laugh. Nijiko didn't sound particularly bothered either way, but turned her head while Ran chuckled and observed her gamely like she was a flowering plant.

"Listen, I never want to hear whatever sweet nothings  _Ryo_  came up with, all right? Don't ever tell me."

"He was sentimental. 'I will turn my back on anyone who exposes their stupidity to the uncaring universe,' the usual fare I imagine. But Koruri is small, so it will be hard for her to hit Haru-san if it hurts. Maybe someone will stand in the room with them."

"You can't stand in the room with someone while they're having sex."

"No, of course not. I'm not interested. Ask Ayu."

"Ask--ignoring that, it's not supposed to  _hurt_." She wanted to prod at it but it wasn't actually funny, looking at Nijiko--Nijiko who wouldn't spare a thimble of water for a plant outside the perimeter of a garden--and knowing even someone who cared about her couldn't read her well enough to know she was in pain.   

"Well, they say that about many things."

"Did you make a joke? Or some kind of koan. I can't tell which, honestly." The sun and the music and the little trills of laughter were making her stupid; she couldn't stop looking at Nijiko's neat lines as always but now her gaze slid up like water back to her hands, which had steadied her many times in their engineer's abstraction but that she now realized were beautiful: tensile and oddly relaxed, the infuriating slump of Nijiko's torso and shoulders transposed to an easy, sensual grip.

"Leave that. I've been thinking," Broad-knuckled fingers, like a good boxer's. "If you'd wanted to sabotage the project altogether, you should have killed your team outright." She delivered this insight in the same laconic tone with which she corrected an equation or straightened an errant line. Ran stopped staring at her hands and rolled her eyes. "You didn't have to build. Why did you create a village?"

She’d gotten used to these questions; she thought Nijiko couldn’t help it and that was what made her an engineer. When you saw something that worked you couldn’t help but want to take it apart, you couldn’t be content with just looking. It’d been a while since someone had looked at Ran like the thing that worked.

"I don't know," she said, still wanting to laugh, dimly aware she shouldn't. Afterimages of sunlight fractaled behind her eyes.  _Close them, it helps_. "It's something ingrained in me," she said, suddenly cautious in the dark.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

In the end she was wrong, after all: her team did come to sit close around her again, with the thoughtless, macabre formality of family gravestones.

Hana didn’t get her facepack or anything else she’d asked Ran for. Koruri's fingers took out a chunk of Ango's white hair when she staggered away from him, pushing him out of the tightknit circle. Akio's jaw clenched in a way she hadn't seen since Autumn Village and then he took his empty pipe out of his mouth and looked at Ran and she understood: no, it wasn't the same. No, they'd forfeited their anger. Now pain would only ever come to them the way an old wound did, the body remembering its own failures. They would never again react like the tireless young people who had been robbed of their belief in a just world; that had been taken. Now they would only ever be tired.

_Until the end_ , said the Ryugu diary, and she thought: you goddamn liar, thanks for doing your job, but when does it end. Life by design now, humanity by design now, and I'm a designer, so tell me when does evil end.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Once it had rained so hard in Autumn Village that the seed cache had flooded and they had to bail the water out with buckets and pulleys. When Akane came in exhausted from diving into the waterlogged cavern one afternoon, sloughing off her diving suit with icy fingers, Ran had taken a look at her and let her go to bed without asking about quota. But then she’d rubbed the salt from her lips and said: Sometimes I remember I used to love diving.

_We did everything right_ , she remembered herself screaming, Akio’s fingers hard and shaking on her chin to hold her head straight.  _We’re here because we did everything right and now we’re killing ourselves just to stay upright and keep a goddamn roof over our heads, they took everything because we gave and gave without asking, and now she’s asking, what do I have to do to make them stop trusting, where do they get off hoping for someone to tell them it's going to be all right._

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

"It's not like that, what you're thinking."

"I’m going to tell you once, and that’s it: I’m not listening to any defense of what they did.”

"I'm not interested in them."

“I find that hard to believe, but that’s fine. You’re not accountable to me.”

She’d been taking all her clothes out of her backpack and putting them back in; she wasn’t sure why. There wasn’t anywhere she needed to go and there was still an entire reservoir to be built. There was no time for a journey, and it didn’t matter anyway. Aramaki was in denial and Ayu had the same restlessness transposed into a more methodical key, couldn’t let something rest until she’d tested a hypothesis, but Ran wasn’t the kind of fool who could stand there and look. She’d already taken their proposition apart: there was no place you could go to be free of it.

You buried a dead girl, and you let the water cover up the mound. That was what you did and she could follow protocol as well as Summer A did. 

Nijiko just stood there and watched, holding her birchbark plans, her tape measures, her waterwheel skeleton, her immaculate white and violet track jacket that after all had never gotten stained and Ran thought out of nowhere, with a vindictiveness she thought had disappeared: just once, just goddamn once, I wish there was nothing for you to hold on to.

“It’s not like that,” Nijiko said again, more slowly. “What you did to your team is nothing like that.”

A flash of red cracked across her vision like a wet cloth. It was hard to breathe for a moment.

“Right,” she said. The frost-starred fields of the first season they’d been there came up in front of her at sickening speed, as though she’d thrown herself through a window at the impersonal earth. “Right. You think I’m upset about  _me_ \--thank you for saying that. Because that proves I’m not like you, and I was starting to think I was.”

Nijiko's gaze went blank. "Don't penalize me for not feeling what you want me to feel, Ran-san," she said, icy, slicing mercilessly into the jugular of the matter as fucking always. "I told you I don't go back, and you should see why, now."

“Nijiko, I didn’t ask you to come say this, and I don’t know why you are, but if you don’t get out--”

“Do what you'd like. I’m not Team Autumn. You can’t hurt me.”

“What does it matter? Not like you’d tell me if you were hurt.”

She already knew all of this. Wouldn't celebrate; she wouldn't grieve. 

"I didn't do anything."

"I know, Nijiko, I just can't be around you right now. I'm going to ask you again, politely--"

"At the test." Her fingers on the lintels of the extension were loose and languid as always; she wasn't even clenching her fist. She stood like she had nowhere to hide, linebacker shoulders straight. "You asked, and you misunderstood. I was asked for help. Multiple times. I didn't do anything. I don't go back."

She couldn't do it after all. Kurumi and Akane had been right to look at her that way; she couldn't say anything that would help. Ran stepped back, hand over eyes, one palm out. Don't come near me: but the damage was done, she was near. 

“What I told you is true,” Nijiko was saying, gathering up her things. She was silhouetted against the blue light outside the hut’s opening, not looking back at her. She couldn’t see her face.  “I stayed because I couldn’t leave this role vacant, because I’m a--professional, as are you. So come outside. I'm going to build this waterwheel.”

Something in her moved at that: the idea that she'd become some fixed component of Nijiko's vast unseen internal blueprint even if Hana had been in pain before she died and Ran should have said something about how to fight when she asked her, that girl who had fought for her, instead of pretending she wasn't the kind of person who would have done anything to beat the pain back for one more day. She would have met her stupid boyfriend, if she’d wanted. She’d have offered her anything not to feel as alone as she must have at the end. 

Nijiko had never offered her anything except the surety that she was a good designer, but after she left Ran looked at the sod between her knees and realized on her blueprint was the safest place on the remaining earth to be. She only understood how much she trusted it--how much she'd longed for something to trust--when she realized again she couldn't trust her own.

She went outside. She put on the white and violet jacket and zipped it up to her chin, colder than she’d been before. Nijiko didn't look at her, and she didn't ask for it.

They put pencils to paper, nails to wood, board to structure and plank to join. They checked one another's work. They built up and around and through the fissures. The reservoir filled, and the land changed, its old outcroppings lost from sight.  

"Something ingrained in me," said her engineer, to her architect. Day after day, they watched water assume the shape of its container. They built.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

And then--for the second time--there was a fire.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

"Stabilizers," said Ran, "cart stabilizers--you can't take Kurumi on a cart that's going to bounce like that--get a tureen of water, a few pumice stones, and--"

"You're not breathing right," said Akio. "I fucking knew. I need you to breathe right." 

"You know it won't be saved," said Nijiko. "I'm just using cloth for now. I need to get to the reservoir. Get cloth and put it in the cart. Don't discuss this any further." She laid a hand over Ran's wrist, the fingers steady as ever. It was like the past weeks hadn't happened. Ran looked at her and wanted to close her eyes against the blankness there that she fought for, to learn on, now that the ground was again being pulled from under her feet.  

"People listen to you," said Nijiko, "whether you deserve it or not. Get what you need," and then she was gone.

One foot moved, then the other. She breathed and put her hand over her mouth, Akio's tired eyes on her all the way as she staggered to the Summer A treehouse and shouted for them not to jettison clothes. So that was to be the last night of their settlement, a flurry of people running from the houses to the forlorn cart with off sashes, headscarves, wadded up sheets and blankets, anything that could have cushioned Kurumi as they got her into the cart for long enough to get to somewhere safe from the flames. Everyone who had been at Autumn Village looked at her as they passed, saying nothing; she didn't meet their eyes. The second time in four years. Maybe it was retribution but some part of her that still reacted to the world like a child let out a peal of protest: I tried to do right here. The dark thought pushed at the edges of her vision; she brushed it away. No time. 

There was a crash somewhere outside Ran's line of sight. When she looked up the sky was filled with a hellish orange light, dispersed, somehow worse than a monolith. This was a light that spoke of hundreds of small individual brushfires, made the disaster palpable within the scope of imagination. She was an architect and she imagined.

And then, just as they were clear of the burn radius, they saw the treehouse go up in a beautiful _swoosh._ Several people screamed and Ran thought joins, planks, ladders, rigging, and then the scene shifted kindling a secondhand heat in her eyes; she thought of the Summer A members clustered around the planks of their gazebo, close together to hear a new language from one another for the first time, the cautious unfolding lightness in her Autumn group's faces that wasn't to her credit, but allowed her to believe it was, Hana's facepacks chipped out of clay and now wrapped in Ran's tent and forgotten and fired into brick just as Nijiko had wanted, the waterwheel's underground river site where she'd asked Nijiko for her digital level and the showers, those goddamn showers, that had reminded her people were still trying to be comfortable. And Nijiko, Nijiko attentive or bored in the honeyed light of what now seemed like the world's first summer, the white line of her throat against the red clay of the reservoir. It was like having put up the skeletons of a public hall that would become vast and beautiful, its windows filled with the glass she'd never stopped wanting to show her. The sight that you got for only a few months traversing your building sites as a professional: the sight of the stars through the beams and pillars that would support people in the process of making their beautiful life. 

The people in the Ryugu diary had died so peacefully she'd forgotten they cried tears of blood before it was over. She started to laugh. Her feet wouldn't move anymore. 

Thank fucking god, she thought distantly, that I couldn't manage the windows. 

"I have to go back," she said to Akio, and thought: again and again. I'm sorry, Koruri, but you never should have said it. I'll always be afraid. "I want--we should firefight instead of leaving--it's my fault Izayoi-san isn't here to..." She hadn't realized it was on the tip of her tongue until it was out in the open, immolating air. Next to her, Akane, cheeks streaked with tears, flinched and looked away. 

"Oran," Akio shouted, "don't you _dare_ \--"

And then Nijiko crashed out of the wreckage of the treehouse and tore down the path towards them, the right sleeve of her jacket on fire. Ban and Gengoro, faster than any of them, shot to her side, long hair streaming, as Ban supported her other arm and Gengoro slapped the flame down. "Drive!" he shouted. " _Now!"_ Karita began to run, Kurumi cried out once and then the cloth cushioned her as they bolted away out of the combined settlement. When Ran got to Nijiko she was exhausted, shaking a little with the flames but clear-eyed enough to look up, her hair sticking to her face with sweat, and toss away what she had in her hand: a long stick covered with pitch, for spreading high flames like the kind that had sent up the treehouse. When Ran saw it, she opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

"I don't care," said Nijiko, in answer to nothing she'd said. In the wrong light--in this light--the cold of her voice sounded like gentleness. "It has no power over me. And now it has none over you either."

One of those things, she thought, as the miasma of action came and pushed conversation away from them, let alone gratitude, was a lie. In the years to come she’d remember that last sight she had of the village where they’d built the reservoir: Nijiko’s hair outlined against the harsh light of the forest fire, her hands now emptied again. Ran couldn't tell what her face looked like in that moment. She was looking back.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

"Ran-san--Kaname-san has a gun with him."

All those years. She understood, then. The diary, the reservoir. You said it when you didn't know. 

When she gave her the seashell for luck, it was the first time in four years she’d picked one up without thinking of the girl at the seashore who had made stained glass. Right then, she did it because those hands had taken her spirit level, planed away paddles for a long-term investment they couldn’t afford to make, opened the door to her hut and helped her leave the village they'd built together with a cold courtesy that had saved her. They were the hands of her engineer who had seen the first world she’d built burn down in front of her eyes but told her in her clear flat voice that she was in pain from a headache, and then they were only Nijiko’s. Ran wasn’t thinking of atonement for anything. She only thought of her walking alone and graceless into the open air, and wanted there to be something in those hands.

"It'll be all right."

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Botan laid a fire for her and swabbed her wound dry, and then she started asking the kind of questions Ran hadn’t heard in years. She ate fake dumplings and sipped from a thermos of black soup, fishing out bits of flavor bark, and she answered in a voice that felt unused for years that she’d done her practicum in fenestration and she particularly liked stained glass from the Oura Cathedral in Nagasaki, that she'd been an only child, and that she was registered in silane treatment for the protection of glass, fat lot of good it did anyone here, but that was what she was in training for--hangars, libraries, halls. "Haha, I used to hate libraries!" said Botan genially. "Finish every drop of that soup." 

She had long braids tucked into a bun at the back of her head, a whimsical wooden pendant shaped like a lozenge between her breasts. Her eyes had the warm, caustic glow of a skydiver or a motorcyclist. They wouldn't have looked twice at one another in the old world, where Ran had owned more than her share of cardigans. There was a comfort to it now; it made them smile as they ate, retroactively fitting all the little details that still endured into an idea of one another. 

"The soup's done--"

"Every drop, Ran-chan!" 

"But I don't want to drink the--"

Botan peered at her happily. "Are you doing this to get scolded more?"

Ran shoveled the rest of the soup into her mouth. "I'm not some kind of masochist, all right? You get what I meant."

"Oh, I did. But that doesn't mean I can't needle you about it for the rest of our lives." Our lives. A flare of warmth arpeggiated up her ribs; she ducked her head so Botan wouldn't see it but she did anyway, flashed a smile at her as they packed to leave. Botan's jacket was windproof and fireproof, made of a dull silver nylon that kept the heat close to her. They used a handcrank LED light of the sort Ran had given Hana. Their shadows slid fluidly over the walls of the nest.

"Chimaki," said Botan, "go ahead for a bit," and Ran knew the time had come. Botan turned back to her. She stopped at a serrated opening to a hole where the light dwindled low, a surprising pinkish tinge to the soil under their boots. She glanced at Ran, apparently wanting to say something, then changed her mind. She took a bandanna out of her backpack. 

"Close your eyes," she said. 

"Why? You think I'll do something?"

"No," said Botan. "I think you're having trouble believing someone is here to guide you. I know what that's like, but denial isn't very helpful for navigation. So cover your eyes, and take my hand. Let's walk."

Her grave, tilted eyes the last thing Ran saw as the bandanna came over her eyes, the LED torch a blue star in the corner of her vision. Botan's fingers, and then her firm grip. Ran extended her arm across the empty distance. They walked on into the dark, the lanterns threw thin angular planes of light that changed the color of the bandanna with the quality of the stone and earth. She allowed herself to be led. 

_Is that how you ruined Autumn Village_ , said Nijiko's light voice. Stained glass in its frames, that confessional light she'd first seen far from home.

"So," said Botan finally. "Ideally I'd buy you a beer, but circumstances being what they are. You'd better tell me from the beginning."

She did. She started with agriculture in Autumn, and the frost they'd all lived with until they instituted their quota system and began to work, and Akane's diving and how she'd stopped telling Ran only after at least a year had gone by, but there was simply no one else. Spanish and English practice with Akio in the hut, making compound words for the things they saw. Kurumi's pregnancy and her fear and what Ran had done, and hadn't. The volcanic ash burning that village to the ground and burying it. Izayoi in the shelter and then nowhere at all. And then she talked about the reservoir, and the treehouse, the waterwheel. She told Botan about the things she'd built. She told her about the things she hadn't. Botan didn't interrupt Ran once. From time to time, as though the cave held an echo, she heard the sound of it: it'll be all right.

"Someone told me," Ran said, "that it keeps happening, the same thing keeps happening, until you do it right. I can't make amends for my team and for Izayoi-san--I don't care about that. I want them to bear a grudge. I thought they were idiots for not killing me. But I just don't want to need anything so much there'd be any danger I'd--do it all again. Someone told me."

"Nijiko-san?"

"No way. Nijiko is--she'll keep doing the same thing over and over. I was angry at her for it, once, or at myself, but she used it to get me out of the village, to keep me building, too. She's just--herself. She doesn't surprise you." The weight of the realization, cool and unobtrusive as water filling a space. She longed for her then, and understood that she'd been longing for her. The flare of pure hope for her that flickered in her chest then collapsed itself to only a compulsive, linear desire to see her again.

"I do trust her," she said. With all her heart. 

"I wouldn't have thought you needed to. You seem like the kind of person who'd build if all you had was a belt buckle and some chewing gum to do it with." She smiled. "Are you afraid you'll sell someone else's soul for stained glass windows again?" She extended a hand behind her to help Ran over a ridge; Ran took it. 

"I can't believe I thought you were comforting." 

"Summer B is a bit of an acquired taste, I'll concede." They were silent for long minutes, listening to the delicate machinery of water in the caverns as they walked. "But believe me this, I look forward to whatever you'll make for us when you get out of here, Shishigaki Ran." 

The Ryugu diary was in Nijiko's pack now but she wished she'd had it to give to Botan so that she'd understand, she only wanted her share of the warm feeling that had made Mark say, at the end that he too had done splendidly. She'd only ever wanted to be able to look back on her life and say, this was when I stopped relying on glaziers, this was when I came to the sea and knew what I wanted to make, this was when they inaugurated the hall I'd made, this was the month I laid the foundations, this was the year I built the windows. 

But Nijiko, before she'd known Ran well, had explained waterwheels to her: the paddles always circle back around, plenty of chances for elevation. There was always the possibility she'd lived to say that only because she too had kept doing the same thing over and over again but they'd come far enough, now, that she realized she wanted to believe something different of her too. There was so much in the reservoirs they all drew from now, held close to their bodies like the bloodstains in Botan's jacket. Maybe it was time to seek the ascent. 

How terrible Koruri's landing had been when she'd come back after the bat attack! She'd clacked her teeth so hard she'd drawn blood, her bones must have shaken when she touched down, the place where she landed hadn't been the right one or even the one she kept dreaming of going back to, but whenever Ran had seen her after that, with Haru, she had the same lightness to her step he did closing his eyes to listen to the charcoal organ. That was what it must have felt like, when you fit the new dream at last to the frame of the new reality. She'd tried to destroy the urge for Autumn, time and time again. But they'd survived in spite of her. They were still searching. And she was part of her team too, at last: she'd never stopped searching since. 

They came to a place where they could hear water. She thought of Nijiko, striding forward in her guileless ruthlessness, the seashell in her hand. 

If she never saw her again, she thought. It would be all right.

Botan took the bandanna off her eyes. The river ran brown ahead of them. "Surprise!" she said. "Trust-building over with, you get a souvenir, Ran-chan." She dropped the wooden pendant into her hand. When Ran put it around her neck, raising an eyebrow, Botan made a picture frame with her hands and made a camera click noise. Then she went about tucking the bandanna into Ran's collar, keeping her warm, lifting her arms to retie her bandages.

"You may not know this," she said conversationally, "but we guides were all given a vial of potassium cyanide, for emergency use--you can probably understand why. I threw mine away, just recently. I'm sure your friend Nijiko could have used it for something no doubt fascinating, but no matter, it's not what I did. I made this, though, to remind me that it was there. Same weight and all, you know. But I think you need the reminder more than I do." She put both hands on Ran's cheeks.

"Ran," she said. "If Izayoi-san had wanted to kill you, he would have. If you're going to get a choice again, make it splendidly. Be grateful for it, not afraid. You don't have time for that anymore. It's time to build your third village."

 

 

 

**~**

 

 

 

 

And even in the wretched, twisting bowels of the earth, you could stumble upon a miracle. 

"Ran-san!"

You came back, she didn't say.

"You shouldn't sound so surprised if you came to find us," she said. 

"I wanted to see the underground river," said Nijiko. She palmed one assessing hand over Ran's shoulder, mottled with blood, and then she was off, unfurling a length of rope. The waterwheel went kachunk-kachunk-kachunk as she hoisted herself onto it to stop the river, and get them all out. As she stopped at the riverbank she pulled something out of her jacket pocket, considered it for a moment, and then tossed it overhand to Ran. The seashell landed in her palms.

"Keep your luck," she said. "I'm all right."

And then she smiled. When she did, Ran didn't think of water assuming the shape of its container, or of submersion, of autumn and its regrets. She thought of Koruri's glider touching down after the bat encounter before she'd known any of their names. A flutter of wings, that awful landing, and then a look--I did this, I'm here, everything is the same but me. I've made my choice, and I am on firm ground.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

When she was hauled up out of the anthill and saw Hana she tried to shake her hand. She couldn't help it, she went wooden. Hana knocked it out of the way contemptuously.

"Hana," said Ran. Stupid, stupid. She was messing it all up. "You're--" the seashell in her sash, the little weight. "We're--lucky to have you back."

"Oh, O-Ran-san," said Hana, like she was the one consoling her.

When she threw herself into her arms Ran turned her face into her hair and shut her eyes to stave off the sudden vision of herself, years younger, discovering for the first time what light looked like through properly-dyed glass you'd done yourself. How different the world looked. If there had been someone there, then, she thought. She'd have hugged them like this.

Hana pulled away, eyes already searching the largest crowd they’d seen in years, so large it may as well have been another hallucination. "Come on," she ordered, like no time had passed.

“What do you need? Are you hurt?”

“Well, nothing!” She laughed. "Did you think I wouldn’t introduce you to Arashi?"

 

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

She hadn't gotten her thoughts in order by the time she got to the spider detox station (it had a handmade sign; a stocky girl with haircutting scissors was snipping cobwebs out of people's hair while screaming "don't look, don't look!") where Nijiko was calmly traumatizing at least three Summer B's by using the fallen cobwebs to staunch their bleeding. "Nijiko," she said stupidly, taking the seashell out of her sash, "you--I meant for you to keep this, it's not exactly a family heirloom."

"I'll take it back when I need it. Anyway, you said it was from your hometown."

Ran used to clench her fists and wrench her eyes shut before settling on an answer and handing in her finals in college, kiss her fingers Italianate and send them off with a flourish in graduate school. Now she only put her hands in her back pockets and rolled her neck, an odd heat damp on one side of her collarbone and the other.

"I said it was a  _tradition_ from my hometown."

"I don't know what you mean by that." A beat. "Probably something only architects understand."

"Oh? Well, nice job down there, engineer-on-call. Five stars, would rehire."

She gave Nijiko a two-finger salute and turned around. She made it four steps, and then three more.

Then she took the seashell out of her sash and slid her thumb from the point of one of the calcified extrusions to its creamy base. The wet, silvery wind of Sado somehow stirred her in places her clothing covered: her stomach, her hipbones, the first knob of her spine. She turned back.

Nijiko was shading her eyes and looking right at her, smiling again for the second time in as many days.

Ran put the shell back in her sash. She retraced her steps. She unzipped the stupid violet and white track jacket from base to collar, set her palm on the back of Nijiko's hip, and yanked her close with a mean little flare of satisfaction at the way those bored eyes kicked open.

"It's you again," Nijiko drawled, composure level again in milliseconds. "You came back."

"Yeah," said Ran, one thumb tucked into her belt, skimming the top of her ass. "Good thing I wasn't the only one."

She tipped her chin up. What a smile! You couldn't get anything done with a thing like that lying around waiting to go off. You just wanted to look. She nearly didn't kiss her. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	2. waterwheel

 

 

 

 

 

They got as far as tent up, shirts off before someone blew a whistle. "God _damnit_!" snapped Ran. "You know, you could look a little more pissed."

"Maybe if you weren't covered in insecticide," said Nijiko, killing the moment smoothly, and promptly resurrecting it by threading her fingers through her hair in a way that had no right to look so debauched considering how many pathetic minutes Ran had spent doing nothing but sliding her zipper up and down between her breasts, dizzy on making out like she was the teenager half of the equation. "But it doesn't have to be an interruption. You can just tell the remnants of humanity you need an orgasm before coming out to work."

"Don't flatter yourself, I'll take a raincheck on--what?"

"It's just a muscle contraction, don't be so immature." She zipped her jacket up while Ran gaped at her. Then she reached out for something that nearly stopped Ran's heart, close as it looked to a genial cheek-pat, but it turned out to be worse, a practical drag of her thumb across Ran's lips, smudging them dry, as though now that the touch barrier had been breached what she really wanted was access to weird minute acts of grooming that both reiterated and contradicted her usual monomania. She'd seen Nijiko train that focus on the earth, rivers, sky, fire, every time ending in the dominance of her own placid superiority, and now she was using it to touch Ran. It made leaving the tent seem completely unreasonable, until the cause of her descent into lower brain functions stole her sash to tie over her hair and said, "You do know it's time now, right."

"For what, getting off? And what do you expect me to do if you take that, go out there with my vest gaping open?"

"Not my problem. And no, for the third village. 'Commercial'...architecture."

It felt like riding a bike carefully between a railing and a river and hearing someone call out from the opposite bank, look up, teeter. "It occurred to me."

Nijiko stopped rolling her sleeves up and turned to her. "Ran-san. Are you forestalling it?"

In her fantasies, she hadn't envisioned being cockblocked and interrogated would feature quite so close to one another within the same experience. "Hand over my sash."

"Meetings bore me."

"Is that a leer? That's a leer. Inscrutable my ass, Ryusei's been a terrible influence on you."

She tied her vest shut like a bandanna. Using cleavage to distract Nijiko from the usual invasive questioning wasn't something she'd ever expected to find herself doing, but it was a good fit, earned her a clinical, proprietary swipe of tongue across her bottom lip from her raincheck kiss. She reflected darkly that it was a good thing Nijiko knew what an orgasm was before it dawned on her that maybe that was a terrible thing to be grateful for and she should do something horrific like grab her hand instead, but as she was eyeing it in trepidation Nijiko gave her a cool look and shoved her hands into her pockets. Ran followed suit in relief, and tried not to let it nudge interrupted trains of thought.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

When they got outside, fashionably late, Aramaki was calling the meeting on one of the many rills where they'd gathered to listen to Sado apple adjacents and eat birdsong, "or it could be the other way around, I wasn't listening," mumbled Chimaki, who happily reinstated among his team gave Ran a headache and composition class flashbacks on sight. No one listened to him. Then Botan called a meeting and about half the people listened to her, and then a smiling debutante-looking individual from Spring called a meeting and everyone somehow found their way over and sat in something resembling a circle in a way that looked premeditated, chewing placidly on the descended-from-apples. "SAVE THE SEEDS," screamed the thief from Summer B, "WE NEED TO HAVE A--"

"Extremely astute," said Ayu. "We need to cultivate an orchard and crossbreed poisonous edibles to cull the remaining spider population. Well spoken, civilian," she nodded in his direction.

"--SEED--sp...itting contest," he trailed off. "But ALSO orchard and poisonous crosstraining, though. Also that! Room for everyone's ideas!"

"Has everyone who needed to be reunited been reunited?" said the debutante pleasantly. "I did hear some encouraging tears, but I was too far away to make out what kind. Might I suggest a headcount?"

They did a headcount. They went around the circle with names, teams, and "one interesting fact about yourself that might surprise your new friends!" upon which Ran had to agree with Akio on the prevailing tone of "girl scout camp" and asked Nijiko to pinch Ryo's deck of cards so she could at least score some juicy larvae off Ryusei's inability to keep anything in his pants up to and including currency. Summer A was exempted from interesting facts by group consensus after Koruri volunteered, most uncertainly, that at the age of twelve she'd tried to land on top of another glider to take advantage of their landing score and achieved a very interesting compound fracture ("It was too relatable," Ran heard Haru tell her loyally).

Team Autumn was the only team that had no reunions to achieve; they all huddled around her, staring at the others, fielding Kurumi from questions, finally taking naps in shifts in a sort of collapsed domino formation about the time the sky began to turn violet for sunset. The debutante's friend, a lanky girl in a dilapidated Doctors Without Borders t-shirt, ferried soup from group to group while the Summer B thief ladled it out from a miraculously complete, seawater-scoured set of kitchenware.

Someone said her name. She looked up, everyone watching her.

Best bring it up rather than have it brought, she thought resolutely, and handed the interesting fact over like a parking ticket: "This will be the third settlement I'll have built here in the last four years, if you decide you want to build here."

"Of course we do," said Arashi, at the same time Hana said "I don't know that we need to settle down yet!"

"If someone wants to leave, they can leave, but the rest of us can put that to a vote," said Akio, a sentence Ran had never heard from him in her life, and said so.

"Um--e-excuse me," said a girl Ran barely remembered but knew to be Summer B both by the stammer and the way that entire team turned encouragingly to her when she spoke. When everyone else looked at her she paled so significantly Hana, safely tangled up with Arashi, had to put an arm around her to steady her; perversely this seemed to terrify her more and galvanized her into speech again. "If we b-build right now...we'll have the largest c-construction crew possible...so...that's an advantage. I think! Y-yes." 

"True, true," said the Doctor Without Borders. "Also I want a hospital. Who's Ban?" Ban raised his hand and she crinkled her eyes at him magnanimously. "Hello! Do you want a hospital?"

He went scarlet and whispered, "I-I've seen them in pictures..." like some Dickensian waif; Kurumi clapped a hand over her mouth, several people grew teary-eyed, Akane reminded them all loudly that Summer A could probably kill everyone in the gathering with a handful of acorns and an inflatable life vest and the treacly moment dissipated. "All in favor!" said the debutante, tinkling a little silver bell she had from fuck knew where, as though anyone would risk forfeiting enough human decency cachet to disagree with a statement like "hospitals;" Ran found herself actually glancing over at the misanthropic likes of Ryo hopefully and was so overcome with disgust she had to put her hand up and set the universe right.

"Right, hello, like I said, I'm Ran, I'm a commercial architect from Team Autumn, I've been registered for two years, and did my practicum--" What was coming out of her mouth? "This is my engineer, Summer A’s Nijiko." Nijiko was slouching against Karita's back reading her own notes and abusing the Summer A fallback of pretending not to understand what you were talking about to ignore you. "We don't really have material sufficient to build a hospital, you'd need to quarry for stone walls sufficient to prevent contagion, so without--" Ryusei's eyes were glazing over; she'd never met a more reliable barometer of laymen's patience in her life. "We can't build a hospital."

"O-Ran-san!" said Hana, eyes aglow. She scrambled to her knees to give herself declarative leverage. "I believe that we who have survived in this world can do anything!"

Various people volunteered inspirational tales.

"What a great group we have," Aramaki beamed half an hour later, holding hands with two people at once and wiping his eyes. "What were we talking about? Oh! Chisa-san, please continue. I am very sorry for interrupting you."

"Not at all, Aramaki-san, and hearing of your struggles, I think we are all even more resolved to build proper hospital facilities as soon as possible so no one else will ever suffer alone through struggles with prehensile seaweed. Coming from a Diet family, I'm relieved to see that budget-mindedness and narrow technical constraints no longer affect our resolve for our fellows." She radiated lethal sweetness in Ran's general direction until she retreated and put her hand back down. "Is everyone able to cohabitate until a hospital can be constructed?"

"Naturally," droned Ayu. "Our relationships with Autumn and Spring are cordial, and the father of my future offspring is well-integrated into--stop that, Taka-san, can't you see I am speaking to this assembly? We are a diplomatic and unobtrusive team experienced in tolerating civilians. Only the odious--"

"We're willing to cooperate and remain contained," said Ryo in a monotone, glancing at Ango, who had spoken briefly to Arashi and Natsu at the beginning of the gathering and now retreated into silence, staring at the ground unmoving. "And we’re...satisfied with Summer B." The thief and the stocky haircutter girl burst into tears.

Ayu sniffed and said, "I personally look forward to working more with the  _rest_  of Summer B, especially your astute agricultural expert--"

She nodded inexplicably at the thief, who upon being fixed with several pairs of incredulous eyes wiped his own, intoned, "Yeah, like I always say...if not for soybeans, what's the point of it all...?" and picked at the grass in a preening manner.

"Very true. Very true. And while we're discussing the parameters of construction, I'd like a greenhouse. Nijiko, write that down."

Nijiko did so and Ayu's puppy ran around in a deranged circle in delight. A chorus of 'awwwws' went up around the circle, further cementing the thoroughly incorrect impression of Summer A everyone who had never lived with them was getting. She and Akio needed to start chucking pebbles at Ango and goad him into a death rant to end the farce but this couldn't be done with Koruri and Haru ensconced in a corner, playing cats' cradle with what was apparently a century-old discarded extension cord; Ran could just see Aramaki formulating a cavity-inducing metaphor about the resilience of life every time his eyes wandered in their direction.

"Do you know what a greenhouse is?" she muttered to Nijiko, resolving to come back to this. A vivid picture of herself and Nijiko scavenging for nickel-sized bits of glass for the remainder of their lives surfaced ominously and fluttered away. 

"Of course not," said Nijiko coolly. "Ayu will tell me and I'll make it."

"Nijiko-san!" The Summer B haircutter girl's hand flew to her heart. "You are an inspiration to us all! Ryo-kun...to think your childhood friend was a woman of such overflowing goodwill...very well,  _I_ want a canopy bed for Hotaru-chan. Because every young girl deserves to feel like a princess!"

"Look, I don't think you understand what an architect is," said Ran. "I'm not making a..." She glared around the circle and stopped; 'Hotaru-chan' was about two feet tall, was still wearing a school uniform skirt, and looked like a hopeful garden gnome. "Fine. One bed. _One._ But that's the only realistic thing any of you have--"

"Oh, Team Autumn, am I right!" The Summer B thief looked around, inviting cosigners. "Such a downer! Arashi, remember?"

"We have a pregnant woman on our team!" protested Akane. "And Ran-san isn't trying to kill anyone right now!"

"Akane, with friends like you," said Ran, unamused, and was appalled when Akane actually beamed at her. "And first impressions were mutual all around, Summer B. No offense, Botan-san." 

"None taken! Isn't it nice that we have all these memories together already. Hahaha."

Ran slammed the Ryugu shelter diary down on the ground. She hadn't meant to; it was only what she'd had in her hands. "Look!" she shouted, and backtracked immediately when Kurumi flinched--a reaction she remembered vividly enough that she ratcheted her voice down by several levels and looked away. She couldn't meet her eyes.

"Look," she tried again, massaging the bridge of her nose. "This isn't how it works. Houses, shelters, water wheels--I'm completely in favor of that, and you can have that for maybe a month or two, until the spiders decide to mount a retake, or some epidemic wipes out half of you, or we all get eaten by sentient amber sap or whatever I was just hearing. Or someone gets exiled, or fucks up beyond what we can support here. But nothing good's going to come of asking for more. It was hard enough to leave our first village--that's why you're crying, I know," but Kurumi wasn't, had just propped her cheek on Ryusei's shoulder and let her hair fan down, tense as a bending branch against her cheekbone. "And our second was just a treehouse, but we all got used to--showers. We need to stop thinking like that. We can't trust this place enough for that yet. I'll build, I've done it before, but...we can't get used to it. Not like this. We build lightly and efficiently, we don't keep expectations of this place, and when it's done with us, we leave without pain. Infrastructure is supposed to make things easier on you. Don't make it harder for it to do its job."

She'd tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice but the usual nausea of deja vu started up again. She rubbed her thumb along the spine of the laminated diary, full of people working with tools far smaller than what she had to produce their contained works, songs, shows, games. But that was the way this place tricked you, made you feel that the greater arsenal commanded the greater victory when it was the other way around. It only allowed a hoard of the smallest things. Ants taking away their miniscule sweetnesses bit by infinitesimal bit.

There was a brief and startled silence. Without thinking of it she'd taken out the seashell again and begun sliding it between her fingers.

Her eyes sought out Nijiko the same way then. She was ignoring the conversation, surprising no one. Her eyelashes cast long triangular shadows over her cheeks in the light of the small fire someone had lit. It wasn't clear that she'd been following at all until she got to her feet, languid, and said, "I don't mind if you keep talking, but I'm going to bed."

"Nijiko-san, a moment," said Chisa. "You're our other builder, aren't you? What do you think of O-Ran-san's proposal?"

Her eyes slid to Ran's. There was nothing elucidating about the expression at all; she looked smoothly untouchable again in the firelight.

"I don't agree," she said. "When we're forced out, we'll build wagons. If something attacks, we'll build walls. And if something happens here," her voice gone completely flat, "we'll build a jail. The goal was always to build a settlement. If Ran-san can't do so--as you said. There are other builders." 

Ran waited for someone, maybe herself, to say something, two moments, three. She reflected wildly that no one had probably heard Nijiko say so many words in her life. The trees shivered impersonally above them.

Chisa hummed a few detached bars of something, thinking. When Nijiko had skulked off, she said with abrupt determination: "I don't think we quite covered everyone's interesting fact! For my part, I'm Taiami Chisa, as you know, and I'm engaged to Haza Akio-san! Is he here? Why, imagine that!"

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

She said, "You literally do not know what a greenhouse is. It's made of glass. We'll be scavenging until we're eighty if we're not stoned for letting Ayu die in a shower of untreated--have you ever seen one?"

"No, have you?" Nijiko was easy, like she was the one who knew how to carry on a conversation. When she saw Ran coming she'd scooped up her bedroll and started trudging over to Team Autumn's huddle.

"What are you doing? Aren't you going to sleep next to Ryo?"

"Why would I sleep next to Ryo?" She was laying out her bedroll as though she hadn't done exactly that for their entire sojourn at the last settlement. "Anyway, it seemed like you wanted to have sex."

“Strangely, not after you insulted me in front of a group of strangers.”

Nijiko shrugged as though this were exceptionally temperamental. “No great loss.”

“Well, likewise.” She set out her own bedroll, sat down with her arms around her knees, unable to get comfortable. She wasn’t angry, not quite, she knew that, but she had a hard time finding the name for her disorientation. She kept thinking of the hollowness of those holes in the hillside, under the ground. Less a feeling than a structural instability for things to blow through and wander around and get lost in. “I wish I could say I appreciate the vote of confidence, but with you, why do I get the feeling it’s not what it is?”

“Because I’m an engineer, and you’re an architect.” Nijiko actually seemed to be waiting for a smile, Ran settled for stretching her feet out so the ball of one touched her hip. Just a reassertion of her presence. Nijiko eyed it levelly as though nothing had changed. Then she said, “Not that it’s relevant, but I thought you wanted to build this settlement.”

Before she could reply Ryusei tapped her on the shoulder and said “O-Ran-san, you got a moment? Sorry, Nijiko-san...”

“Are you imposing on me?”

Ryusei went scarlet. “Um, I don’t think--”

“Then don’t apologize...or do what you’d like. I’m asleep anyway,” she lay down and put one pale wrist over her eyes, inert as a starfish. Ran made an ‘ignore’ gesture and said, “What can I do for you?”

She hadn’t had set much store by Ryusei since Team Autumn was first awoken and when asked for skills he answered ‘snowboarding;’ incipient fatherhood had predictably intensified his spoiled tendencies but rather becomingly turned them outward to select others. Watching him eye Nijiko fretfully and whisper, “Should you put the covers on her? Kurumi likes that...” Ran reflected ironically that the cachment area of said others might have been larger than she suspected. She declined to tuck Nijiko in with no great difficulty and waited for him to say something.

“I’ll understand if you say no,” he equivocated sotto voce.

“Spit it out.”

“C-could you build a hall? In the new village? If you have time?”

“If I have time? What is this, mom’s weekly grocery run?”

“Well, the thing was that I thought it’d be easier than a cathedral. Though I don’t know. I’ve never seen a cathedral. But Kurumi always wanted to get...m...married in a....”

“I’ve seen a picture of it,” said Nijiko, hand still over her eyes. Ryusei shot her an aghast look. “Mosaic fenestration...it’s of no interest to me, though.”

“No one is building anyone a  _cathedral_ , I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.” Ryusei bit his lip. “And a hall is...Ryusei. I’m not even committed to building here.”

He took his bandanna off. He untangled some of his long locks of hair, classic playboy finger curls growing out; he was beginning to look the way he had when he’d first come to Autumn Village. But he met her eyes now, with a frank, terrified sort of responsibility but a responsibility nonetheless. It made her feel preemptively exhausted and rageful to be looked at that way, as though she were standing in front of someone who stood with their arms outstretched like she was the ancient villain in some two-bit drama. But she couldn’t fault anyone for looking at her that way, after all. There was nothing to do but do what he’d already done, and accept responsibility.

“You weren’t last time either,” he mumbled, so quiet she had to bend forward to hear. “It’s just who you are.”

When he’d gone back to Kurumi’s side of the huddle she lay down and stared at the stars, the clear sky salted above a dark tracery of leaves. "You'd think they'd learn from what happened to us."

“People need many strange things to live,” mumbled Nijiko.

“Where’d you pick that up, kibbitzing on org psych with the murderous wunderkind at school?”

“Where do you think?”

The smile in the nest came back to her--not the beauty or even the incredulity of it, only its sudden responsibility, the odd trust there. She turned to look at her.

“Do you like it here? As a site, I mean. It seems too good to be true."

She didn't know if it was rhetorical or not, or whether she meant the settlement or the powerful, flexible thing that stretched between them even now, tautening and loosening like a rubber band, but she knew she was speaking to the one person here, and that meant in the remaining world, for whom she didn't have to do anything with the sheer exhaustion in her voice.

"I'm not entirely comfortable with it, no," said Nijiko slowly. "For various reasons, I'm doubtful of excessively engineered perfection."

Not awkward at all. Ran cracked her knuckles. Above them the starry sky wheeled, unselfconscious of its load of stars. "I don't think it'll last."

She could feel the low-drifting veil of sleep, fine and soft with a receding quality to it, as though she were still deep in the earth, sleep a cobweb swept from her cheek by Botan's hand. You are not alone, the motion said, and that was true now too, Nijiko's absurd hair curlicued against her skin. She pushed her forehead against Ran's shoulder. Her breathing evened out the way the Autumn members' did around her, as though there was something safe about Ran she herself had missed, as though she hadn't been gambling with their lives from the moment she got here. Things like this were unreliable out here, the softness of that girl with a headache who had been easily pacified by a seashell was a fluke, and the refractory period after near-death events, during which such flukes were acceptable, was receding. She felt a brief susurration of terror. She had an insane vision of herself turning around in the bedroll and doing something awful like patting Nijiko's head.

"I don't really care," admitted Nijiko.

Ran felt the urge to laugh, and thought if she indulged it it might come out as tears, which was unfortunate. "Well, good, I wouldn't want to get the wrong impression."

"That's not what I meant.” Her hand came up then, twisting loose the bandanna knot of Ran’s vest, and--there. Instead of cupping her breast she slid her hand wide like a measuring handspan, her thumb along Ran’s sternum. Assessing the thudding heartbeat. Something had changed, after all, in the ant’s nest. Some latch slipped loose. Ran lay still, and waited holding her breath for whatever was about to enter. "What I meant was it’s true, that is who you are. Perhaps it’s who I am too."

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Nijiko was gone the next morning laying out “water source, don’t contaminate” gridlines with stringed baubles in lines and arrows. Several people commented that they gave the settlement a festive, gingerbread-house sort of air and asked her for extras to hang on their tents until they were discovered to be severed ant heads. If it was an apology it was a wretched one, but as a feat of design it gave Ran a sort of sick buoyancy all the way through taking out her pens and shaving out big sheets of birchbark drafting paper and sliding the froth of stage fright along to a different part of her brain like the bubble in a spirit level.

When she went outside to lay the sheets out on the ground in the early morning she saw Aramaki and Ayu arguing about something by Ayu and Koruri's tent, Kuroda huddled in Ayu's arms while she fidgeted with his ears. Aramaki took off his baseball cap and scrubbed his fingers through his hair; she'd seen enough Koshien coverage through people refusing to turn it off in the library in the old world that she knew he'd looked like this after shutout offense innings, frustrated by opposing pitchers precisely because he wanted to do what they did. Nijiko, with unironic hypocrisy, had told Ran that Ayu had a reputation for being standoffish, but she spoke generously now, long gesticulations in the air, defenseless palms. Finally she pulled the rope of her hair taut, spun on her heel, and stalked off into the tent. Aramaki stared after her, stricken, then knelt and called Kuroda, who snuffled offendedly at his palm. He looked up and spotted Ran.  

"Haru honestly has better luck with the Summer A heart-to-heart situation than I have," she said, panicked. "They're all on edge here for some reason. I'd stay clear for a day or two."

He gave her a wan smile. "I wasn't going to say anything. You're up early. Have you had breakfast?"

They had tea and half a crocodile egg apiece. He made a nut drink for her that wasn't but felt like hot chocolate. This seemed to demand something in return, so finally she said, "Aramaki-senpai, I'd been meaning to ask--"

"S-senpai!"

"Don't false-modesty me, hierarchy is a tool. Why didn't you ask for a baseball diamond? At that meeting. If anyone...you'd have been entitled. And I can wrangle that better than your girlfriend's greenhouse."

He looked at her for a few moments and then became preoccupied with Kuroda, finicky without his mistress. At some time they'd made a collar, as though someone might actually find him and send him back to a street address. Ran snagged it and turned it over; the little tag had no name or information but a recipe for a deworming formula on the back. 

"O-Ran-san, you may not know this, but I had a hard time without baseball." He apparently had no sense of irony. "So I--it made an impression that Ayu-san and I got to play."

"No one could guess," she said, deadpan. "So it's some kind of...self-denial thing?" 

He was silent for a while. She'd never talked to him much but Hana had told her he did this, lapsed off into silences that were a shade too long or absentminded, a corollary of the conversations he'd had in his mind for so many years. People were beginning to get up now. She saw Chisa and Fujiko, hands interlinked, disengaging absently as they went their separate ways. She saw Arashi give Kurumi a floppy bow and present her with a basket of shellfish while Akane glowered.

Ayu came out of her tent and whistled for Kuroda; he leapt out of Aramaki's arms and went to her happily. She eyed him with fond severity, cast a searing glance back up at Aramaki, then left to join a squadron of people heading out for a run, something she'd never done in their combined settlement. They watched the pale flag of her hair recede down the hill.  

"She'll try anything," said Aramaki quietly. "She believes the next thing she does will make her happy--she's about the future, more than anyone else here. But I've never heard her remember anything from the past. She doesn't long for it, she doesn't miss it. I can show you poisons greener than grass, she told me, before she left, when we couldn't even talk yet." He laughed. "So--she doesn't understand me, then, not really. No matter how I think she does."

To Ran this sounded like semantics, two optimistic people who had spent too much time believing that they and not their optimism were various grades of ineffective that they made up on the spot to justify the fact that the world wouldn't conform--the most optimistic idea of all, in a way. She had learned that in Autumn Village. But it was astounding and impractical that after so much time they both still kept the expectation of understanding from one another. Not enough that they should be able to talk to one another, share a certain physicality if not the one Ayu wanted yet, divide the burdens of their individual grievances without flinching away. More than so many people received, but they wanted more anyway. They were greedy people, having been able to make things grow; it only required meeting the conditions another living thing had already set and then the plants, the animals, would live their lives and that would be an end in itself.

It was nothing like building. When you left construction--when it deteriorated--there was nothing there anymore to show you'd done something great. 

"She took it from me, I think." Aramaki's voice was light, as though he'd forgotten Ran was there. So pleasant, regretful. He'd sounded that way on the Koshien broadcasts as a child, apologizing for his own dreams. "The idea that playing baseball on a diamond again would be the best thing, because--it steadied me the same way, what she did for me. I'm not angry at her. Only she doesn't understand what it's like, not to be able to forget. I'll try again."

Again and again, until you get it right, said Koruri's light voice. Ran closed her eyes, opened them, thought of those disastrous landings and the way Haru laughed at them. It wasn't much but it was good enough to steel herself, to get up in the pinkening dawn and thank Aramaki for her tea. To start with a hardened heart on the next chance to get it right.  

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

"Do you think the test will come back to you?"

"What?"

"Like the fire. Do you ever wonder if you'll have to think about what you did again. Sorry, didn't do."

"No."

"As always, I'm hot for your introspective powers."

"If you didn't feel you were tested, perhaps it's only others' tests that come back to you."

"What?"

"Something Ryo said. When we killed--"

"Look, I never ask you for anything. What have we  _decided_ about quoting that as viable life advice?"

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Volunteers: construction, sanitation, cooking, medical treatment, cartography, and then they pulled off an honest-to-god election to coordinate the entire affair. Nobody wanted to explain to Summer A what it was but it turned out they knew already; they suggested it, wide-eyed as clowns and about as serious, as though they'd privately suspected the entire thing was some kind of civilian inside joke and were shocked when it actually materialized: slips of leaves used as paper, ballot box in an old crate of canned peas, et cetera. It was a write-in and outrageous. Nijiko, having professed lack of interest already, was sent on survey to look at the underground cave network again. Ran had been picking her pen up and setting it down, frustrated, every time she tried to do lay down the most basic floorplan for the public hall, a little more sick to her stomach every time she did it thinking of earthquakes, floods, fires and everything else that had wiped out planned common living areas in the new world in an instant. 

So she went to the election. Botan stood next to her the entire time with her arms folded and said things like "Wow!" and "I love that sweet spot between the inception of parliamentary procedure and the need for law enforcement strategy!"

"I really must decline," said Chisa, hand over mouth. Fujiko--that was the medical student's name--said, "You're gonna kill it, everyone knew since you handled that meeting yesterday. I voted for you seven times. Corruption!" She high-fived Semimaru; they'd become inseparable destined friends on sight. "Isn’t that what you always say?”

“Not exactly with that inflection.”

“Oh, you...yeah, anyway, I'm thinking you should probably have a weird hat or something, like a president--"

"President?" said Summer B's Natsu. "Ah...Chief? It sounds odd..." She stumbled over one of the ant heads.

Semimaru looked at her, then at Fujiko. The same delighted expression broke across both their faces at once.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

"Queen Ant Taiami Chisa," Ran said flatly, when the august personage in question tapped on her tentpole that night, while she tacked her drawings to a jury-rigged table. “Sounds better than your granddad’s title, if you’re any relation.”

“Thank you, I am,” said Chisa, undaunted by the blatant accusation of nepotism. She pulled one of Ran's empty ink dishes towards her on steadyhanded autopilot, apparently not having realized it wasn’t teaware. “And I think it was a charming idea of Natsu's! Sort of alludes to a shared history...though she denies that it was her idea. Had it crossed out of the notebook, if you can believe...anyway, if you wouldn't mind. I thought you could take a walk with me."

"Do you need something?"

"Well, naturally. But I'd also like you to take a walk with me."

"Notebook? Tape measure?"

"Just a toolkit. And a small measure of discretion."

She cast a look at Nijiko's workstation, where one of the track jackets had been slung over the desk presumably in her hurry to leave before being forced to participate in the general social contract. She swept it up and shrugged it on, joining Chisa outside her tent, and they went past the Summer A enclosure to Spring, although the lines had been blurred, and people were beginning to put up sleeping areas more on the bases of things they'd been working on during the day. By the time they got to Summer B, Ran knew what it was about. 

"Did Arashi and Natsu..." 

"They know it's an issue. But they're with Hana-san. I asked Botan-san to take Semimaru and Matsuri to look at cleared ground with Ayu-san, to start on their soybean project. I didn't think you'd want others around."

"If Hana were here, she'd offer to leave the settlement again, so that would be counterproductive." She thought Chisa was lying: she must have known Ran would want someone around. But when she glanced over to say as much Chisa's face was completely composed, like a stone buddha, like one of the supply shelters with their plenty not disguising their hidden designs.

Each team had had someone, she thought then. None of them had been free from decisions, and out on the frosty fields Team Autumn had stupidly thought itself unique. 

She drew the tentflap aside. Ryo looked up, gave Chisa a calm nod. Ango stayed looking at his hands. "So--what are we doing here. Jail? A fence? It's obvious exile's not sustainable anymore. We need something if you're going to stay." The terror that had screamed in her chest when Botan had found her in the ant's nest came back again, prickling like heat. "Never mind. I want--" The blank sheets of paper; she put her hand over her eyes. Autumn Village hadn't needed a jail; she didn't want to think about what she'd have done if there had been one.

The wooden pendant between her breasts had a coldness to it, as though it were made of metal. Until you get a chance to do it right.  

"Chisa, ask Sakuya and Akio to have a look after," she said. "And Botan-san, and...Ayu-san, she can talk to Hana. I want to know if it's sustainable, if it's effective, and if it'll help people feel safe. I'll need two days to finalize the padlock, but we can't do anything truly unbreakable without metallurgy, so...the two of you, it'll have to be loud, to make it clear you're in the room, and slow you down, if it can't stop you. Depending on what I use, you'll still be able to work, but I'm not sure how to manage an elastic sufficient for..."

"Is that Nijiko's jacket?" said Ryo, and tossed his head when she startled. "You look like that, O-Ran-san. But we were trained to solve problems."

She stared at him. "Yes. It's Nijiko's."

"Upper left inside pocket." She checked it; there was a thin length of soft vinyl cord, the sort used for tying off lanyards. "It's thin, but--"

"Matsuri braided your hair in the nest," said Ango to him. It was so quiet she had to lean forward to hear it. "She said it would stop breaking that way...it makes sense. Like trebled knots. So--"

When they came back to her own tent, Chisa kissed her on both cheeks. "Thank you," she said. She was shaking. "I didn't want Hana to think none of us--that just because we need them to survive, and they've had--troubles, she should just--" 

"You did fine."

"It's only--" Her mouth thinned. "It is so easy for places to demand forgiveness from people who are kind. That's the worst thing this place took from us--the fact that we need _everyone_. I understood that when Fujiko and I were alone, but I'm afraid she hasn't realized it yet."

"Chisa." Ran remembered the diary's exact words, took them out in lieu of anything of her own to give. "You did splendidly. These things are going to happen, it's the reality of the world. You can't plan for a utopia. Trust me, been there, fucked that up. Don't let that Red Cross postergirl of yours kumbaya you into some guilt spiral because you don't feel sorry for some people."

Chisa laughed, coldly rueful, drew herself up along her spine. So this was a long-standing bruise, then. "Fujiko teases me about it all the time, but she'd be a charming campaign wife. Quite convinced that just because everyone can live together it means everyone should." 

Biting her nail and running war-games in her head, she looked more like a little girl in braids and acne cream than she probably ever had back then, when that was all she would have been to Ran if they'd crossed paths. She saw Akane shivering in her diver's outfit in front of her, Nijiko's blank-faced horror at the fire and then she looked at Chisa's bitten lip and thought: what the hell am I doing.

"They wouldn't have listened to you otherwise," she said, feeling for the bruise and then pressing recklessly down on it. The lower lip quivered. A little further; she crossed her arms. "People like Fujiko and me, we relied on having gone to school to legitimize us, but you won't have that for what you do. Better get used to it." There!--tears. Chisa buried her face in her hands. Ran waited until she was far enough along to be convinced she was truly alone and succumb thoroughly to her sobs, then laid one hand carefully on her shoulder.

 _So strong,_ she could hear Hana saying with such admiration, and she thought of herself on her frost-starred fields, looking up at the sky in the first year thinking: if there are cameras, I won't give you the satisfaction of seeing me cry. But she'd only thought that at all because she'd already felt weakened by her inclination to tears. She wondered if Kurumi had cried when she'd learned of her pregnancy. Sakuya had only cried when he and Akio exiled the boys. She could never take their tears like she would for Chisa now, never the same way. But the waterwheel turned, then. The chance coming back. She could take it now. She drew the hand on her shoulder in, closer, until Chisa was folded against her chest. Her tears were hot on Ran's shirt but turned cool right away, exposed to the night air. 

"Thank you," she said, wiping her eyes savagely dry. "I--I haven't done that in--"

What would Botan have said? "Look, if it doesn't work out with your girl--you and Akio, he doesn't like anyone. I think Nijiko had the same idea, you know, underworld power couple."

She laughed--the little girl and the politican, both of her laughed. "Please, O-Ran-san. I daresay I'd make a good doctor's wife too."

This had been this girl's stained glass, Ran thought. She'd taken comfort in the machinery of society and predictable deterioration of corruption as a young woman; they were the laws that allowed her to build. They stayed outside Ran's tent for a few more moments, watching the underbellies of low clouds, pinkened light on trees from fires, and then Ran bowed, a motion her body remembered well though it'd been so many years, had longed for. Giving respect to someone else, even if you couldn't yet give responsibility. She went inside. She could still see Chisa as she headed towards the soybean plot. Spine straight, lantern held aloft, her tired eyes leveled forward into the dark.

A tumbler clicked round inside Ran's mind. She went back to the drafting plan with its amorphous square and spun it on an axis.

When she set the pencil down she had four quadrants: underground, held aloft, grounded, afloat on the sea, and then like magic she could see the evacuation contingency routes laid among the divided quarters, time enough to save each from disaster, but far enough apart that people wouldn't always be under the same roof. For the first time since she'd come it looked real. Somewhere she could imagine herself building. This wasn't a dream, it was something better: a real place. Just because everyone could live together didn't mean everyone should. But this was paradise. Perhaps it could be a place where they didn't need to.     

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

In the middle of the night she opened her eyes; Nijiko had her hand on her collarbone, unzipping the jacket. The curve of her jaw was traced in cold silver light from outside, the full moon shimmering in the open lawn outside the tent. She must have gone on survey with Chimaki; she was wearing a headband and looked, unusually for her, like a cloth that had been soaked in something and then given a quick wring. "It's uncomfortable," she said by way of explanation. "Lift your arms. You'll pull a muscle if you sleep in it and I'm not feeding you soup."

"I was sleeping in it," she said, but lifted her arms obediently and let Nijiko peel her out of it. She took off the rain slicker she herself had been wearing for survey and began clipping it to a trough to let the water trickle down into a bowl. Ran started to say something and stopped dead at the expression on her face.

"You look like shit. Want a fire?" Nijiko shook her head. "Well, you're drenched, I'm not--what did you say? Feeding you soup. Either."

"So use your imagination."

That was easy enough to understand. Under her sleeping bag, unzipped all the way to cover them both, she had enough room to drag her hand down Nijiko's spine and ascertain that her posture really was as awful as it looked. To her surprise Nijiko wound her arms around her neck and tipped herself up to be kissed, none of the bruising attack-dog singlemindeness of their first night out of the anthill. This was downright idyllic. Never easy to mistake her for anyone else, she was hard to replicate. Her wiry hair, her eyes sheened with silver in the dark like two scales. But where Ran touched it, the bare supple skin at her waist lost some of its tension. 

"Did survey go badly?"

Nijiko smiled. "Maybe you're just not holding my attention."

Nothing to be done. She got her up, back against the tentpole. She took her wrists and brought the clinical engineers' hands she'd never stopped noticing to her breasts. They couldn't go fast enough when they'd tried it after the anthill but it was slower now, as though they moved towards one another underwater, and the thumbs skating over her nipples elicited a slow-brimming, roiling ache that made her duck her head so Nijiko wouldn't see what felt alarmingly like tears. "This is pathetic," she muttered. "Why are you in such a weird mood tonight? What did you find down there."

The tired way she pulled back her hair. "It was routine survey for foundations, Ran. The goal isn't to find anything." She paused. "It's a mountain underground, that's all. Difficult to work with."

 _Ran._ She wound her arms around her waist, dragged her fully into her lap and dragged a bite across a skipping vein in her neck, the swell of one breast where it sloped towards her heart. She rested her forehead on her bony shoulderblade. "I manacled Ango and Ryo today," she said into the skin, its clean clay scent. "That's what we decided."

Nijiko's hands wound around her neck again. It was a practical movement from her, keeping them pressed as closely together as possible, but then her clawed hands, lifting Ran's hair away from her neck. "Oh? What did you use for a padlock," and the clinical voice steadied her, even now when it should have been anything but clinical, so much that she laughed aloud, and Nijiko caught her breath, feeling the laugh like a resonance from Ran's body to hers. "I scavenged a few click-and-turn padlocks at Ryugu. Chisa and Botan can keep the combinations. And then I braided elasticized vinyl--in your jacket pocket--and made bells from steel caplets. Ryo helped. They were in his gun maintenance kit...so now they can work, it's just--slow. It's slow. And then I came home and drew a four-quadrant habitat." She sighed. "Goddamnit."

"If one can float, it could be a detachable raft for evacuation." 

Ran laughed. "Your ideas are so _dreamy_. It's totally off-brand. You know what, let's just light a lantern tonight, you can look through those plans. Pretty sure that'll get you off faster."

"I'll fall asleep." 

"Lie down, then." 

"I thought your absurdly inconvenient chest would be more uncomfortable."

"Surprise," said Ran. Nijiko's eyes had closed, but her hands tightened in Ran's hair. "Let's, uh, revisit your prior data gathering about my chest sometime."

"Ran." She'd been disentangling them to lay Nijiko down in the sleeping bag but stopped at the tone of her voice. "Don't move."

"I'm not quite smooth enough to get us both into bed without letting go of you," but she did, somehow, pressing her against herself with one hand on the small of her back, heated pulses skipping under the skin, the rhythm of her alive and beating blood as their legs tangled together and the soft join at the back of her knee hooked with Ran's. She slept like they'd already been doing this for years, or rather, in that manner she had as though she'd been planning it. Ran wouldn't have trusted anything but for that she came close. For Nijiko's plans her heart blank and waiting, a canvas of glass, dyed and complex in its history, but its nature only clear, limpid, pure. 

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

She saw Botan dashing down to the soybean cultivation site the next morning in a great hurry. "Can't talk now!" she called to Ran as she passed. When Ran had trailed her all the way to the site she found a circle of people already gathered, Semimaru doing a surprisingly adept job of restraining Matsuri from leaping bodily at Ayu, who looked no less livid. Both looked like they hadn't slept all night. Natsu of all people had thrown herself over a film strip of plants lying on the ground between them, eyes shut; the strategy seemed to have worked as both of them had forgotten about it in favor of screaming at one another vehemently enough that Ryusei, that idiot, had his hands over his ears. Botan waded deftly into the fray and confiscated Ayu's trowel.

"Neesan! Tell her I know what I'm doing," Matsuri shrieked when she spotted Botan. "She was digging up our soybeans!  _Our_ soybeans! She s-said Semi-chan wasn't even a real agricultural expert--I don't _care_ if it's true--"

"How did you not figure this out?" snapped Ayu at Ryo, who had used his manacles as convenient justification to avoid getting involved, a look he was plainly copying from Nijiko. 

"I was deceived. If you ask him about hothouse flowers--"

"Natsu," said Botan, ignoring everyone else. "Help me out here." To her surprise Ran saw Nijiko, already dressed and holding onto Ayu's upper arm as she shook in rage. She looked neither put-upon nor bored by the proceedings, which was so shocking she had to go over to them and jab Nijiko's lower back in question. Nijiko gave her a look as though she'd never seen her in her life. Natsu hugged the film sheet to herself and made a strangled noise.

Apparently Semimaru and Matsuri had staked out ground for soybean cultivation, hoed it down during the night to surprise the rest of their team, and planted two out of their five sheets of hoarded soybeans. The Spring girls, who had come by to ask for a haircut for Fujiko, had seen the plot, said something about mushrooms, and gone to get Aramaki. He'd brought Ayu, who had gotten so angry at the introduction of a new species into the Sado ecosystem without research that she began digging them up on the spot, upon which Hana had tried to reassure her that Sado was a preserved ecosystem and she completely lost her head. _Did you see the spiders?_ she'd been shouting when Natsu herself got there, _only civilians could think that was an acceptable job of preserving anything_ , Fujiko had retorted that it was better than nothing, Akio said acidly that they couldn't expect a different answer from a voluntourist without a medical license and things had gone downhill from there. Ran exchanged a look with Akio and knew instantly what had pissed him off; Spring and Summer B were the opposites of Autumn, could have dealt with maligned competence, but insults to their teammates were obviously beyond the pale.

Tears were streaming down Matsuri's face. "We saved those! We could feed so many of us--we could grow healthy food without needing to move all the time--Ayu-san, if it weren't one of us doing it you'd never have done that, you'd have asked for our _reasons_. But you assumed we don't have any at all!" She wiped her nose on Semimaru's sleeve. "S-Summer A doesn't even have any reason to think of us as failures. You weren't there. Nobody told you we--"

"That's exactly right! Didn't you hear what O-Ran-san said? Let go of me, why am  _I_ always the one being restrained?!" Ayu jerked her arm away from Nijiko. "Build lightly and don't expect anything, she's right. You people are obsessed with recreating a past that doesn't exist and I'm sick of us cleaning up after the messes you keep making for nothing more than  _nostalgia_. But understand this: we don't care what the old world was like. We don't have any reason to love it." Ran took a step back, blood suddenly beating in her ears. Aramaki had been speaking in a calming voice to Kuroda, who clearly wanted to go to Ayu's aid; he trailed off. Ayu wiped her eyes, furious. "If you want to grow these, we can find a way to do it that won't destroy everything else. But you didn't even think of that. Every life is valid. Summer B, you should understand that. We haven't gotten along, but _you_ \--" she turned to Hana, voice suddenly small, "understand that. Right?"

Hana dropped the jacket she was holding in an instant and went to Ayu's side. They were both prickling so intensely they couldn't do more than meet one another's eyes, but Ayu ducked her head, breathing harshly, and finally, awkwardly, with all her heart in it, Hana offered her a hair tie. Natsu bit her lip and went to Matsuri.

Botan waved her arm between them. "Stop it!" she said sharply. "This isn't picking dodgeball teams. You're both going to Chisa right now, and you're going to talk about this like adults, with Ban and Aramaki-san and Natsu, yes, Natsu, don't look at me like that, I want someone with real fieldnotes. Ran, where are you?" Ran raised a hand. "I realize this is the kind of thing you just let slide in--" she winced at the look on Ran's face, and put a hand over her eyes. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean--I want you to work with this group on finding a site for these soybeans. And Ayu-san...what's the  _matter_ with you? I'll take care of our Matsuri, but--"

"I'll speak to Ayu," said Nijiko.

Before Ran left with the group Nijiko took her aside. She shook her head as soon as Ran opened her mouth. "No," she muttered, "don't talk to me right now. But the underground chamber that receives sunlight--the one where Kurumi and Ryusei stayed--that's the site you want. Ask Iwashimizu Natsu, she has my survey notes."

"The quality's too spotty for irrigation, you'd need a whole new waterwheel--"

"I'm aware. I've been reassembling one two levels below the one we saw, and there's a river that connects to the outside of the island."

"What? How do you know--there's no way you could've done that much in one day."

"I'm working on it."

"Nijiko."

"I said I'm working on it. I know irrigation. Go away."

So she left. She took Matsuri with her, cheering her up in a blatantly mercenary fashion by telling her she'd heard she had expertise with her hair type and knowing she'd hit jackpot when Ryo took his cue and asserted that she did, upon which Matsuri smiled wetly at them both and sniffled something about her putting her love into her work. "Thank you," said Ran, and meant it for more than the beauty tip; she saw Matsuri's wide eyes rake over her, the perceptiveness there. Natsu was with her, worrying at the uncut fringe of her hair. To Ran's surprise, when she caught her eye, she gave her a despairing, level look as though so used to being intimidated by now she simply felt comfortable knowing what to expect. 

"O-Ran-san," she said, when Matsuri trudged ahead. "Have you spoken to Nijiko-san? At the site--you should--"

"Is something wrong?" She tried to find a delicate way to phrase it. "You should have more confidence in your fieldnotes."

That changed something. "I note d-down everything," Natsu admitted. She paused. "I don't know how much of it is of use. But it's everything. And I d-do know when someone is keeping something from me...it m-might be wise to pay attention. That's all..."

She swore. "If she thinks she can get away with not telling me--"

"Then she must have a r-reason," said Natsu. Ran had assumed they were done talking and glanced at her in surprise. Her mouth was threaded into a thin, bitter line. "I know y-you...would be happy for p-people to trust you again. So you should know. Why they m-might not."

"What?"

Natsu blinked. "Oh m-my god. I'm sorry! I'm really sorry."

"No, don't apologize. That's true. That's--do you always do this with people who scare you?"

She saw the response she didn't give: there's a reason they scare me, and it isn't my fault. Something had changed since the last time she'd seen this girl. She waved off the next impending apology and said, "Remind me to poach you next time I want a site survey. You're useful."

"Oh! Oh m-my." 

When she looked back she saw Nijiko holding Ayu by both shoulders and saying something very quickly in a low, rote voice as though reciting back memorization. Ryo followed her gaze; doubled back, and all three of them spoke to one another. Then Nijiko took her mirror out of her pocket and sent a flurry of Morse letters in the general direction of the camp. Ayu gazed at her, all three plainly agitated. 

Then Ayu wiped her eyes and went over to Aramaki. He reached for her, eyes full of concern, but she batted his hand aside. "May I have my dog, please," she said, still in the cold injured voice. When Kuroda came into her arms she buried her face in his fur and refused to speak to anyone any longer. Ran felt a sharp, savage urge to go back for Nijiko, hold her in the same way, but when she shaded her eyes at her she only made a dismissive gesture. Her hair in her eyes, too far away to see the expression. They were all stenciled against the enormous clouds above the tree canopy. Something was very wrong. They looked like they had when they'd first come out of Ryugu, except that it was rare to see Nijiko so integrated into their discontent. They didn't look like the people they'd learned and fought with and expected understanding of. They looked like children, holding their position. All the impersonal immensity of the sky behind them. 

 

 

 

 

 

 ~

 

 

 

 

 

Natsu's fieldnotes from Nijiko's expedition reported that there would be room for irrigation if there were another waterwheel built on the lower Sado level. Ran amended her blueprint to four living quarters, a public hall, and an attached adjacent field. She left the rolled-up blueprint next to Nijiko's bedroll. She tapped her pen against her lips, a feeling expanding slowly beneath her breastbone. When she went to get her hair done, she waited until the scissors had settled into a peaceful, syncopated ease.

Then she mentioned that Kurumi wanted to have a wedding, and she, Ran, was making a public gathering hall for the purpose--would Matsuri perhaps be interested in rounding up construction volunteers?

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

The next day she walked into Chisa's tent with two drawings and a set of dimensions done in the haphazard hand of an engineer who hadn't been able to get up and put her clothes on before starting to scale, using Ran's sleeping back as a lap desk. There was a vote; the hall was chosen for building first. Koruri pushed off from a tall cedar, scouted, and found through some innovative updraft surfing the sunny rill that would see the most sunlight, and kissed Haru full on the mouth when, flushed with stupid secondhand pride, he accidentally dropped Ran a condescending "Thank you" for complimenting her on her site scouting. In what passed for excitement for Nijiko she forgot to wear her gloves to the frame-laying and contracted a laceration on her hand, inciting shocked whispers and rampant slacking as the entirety of Team Autumn crept around behind her for the entire day trying to sneak a glimpse; she overcompensated and kept them on all night so that Ran woke up with latex in her mouth for the first time since a wretched college orientation experiment. Ban and Fujiko fought first deferentially and then vehemently over who got to treat the injury due to various individuals' vicarious desires to hear tales from Nijiko's medical history, tried to settle it by competition, and promptly lost half a day to a settlement-wide tournament featuring Summer A's inability to play rock/paper/scissors and propensity to contest any outcome with increasingly creative stipulations on how rocks could "annihilate" paper.

On the day construction began, Hana and Aramaki meandered around the entire camp from about six in the morning shouting things like "ISN'T IT SO GREAT TO BE BUILDING TOGETHER FINALLY?" which only resulted in guilty-looking sleepy people productively spilling out of tents when it was adjusted to "ISN'T IT SO GREAT TO BE BUILDING TOGETHER FINALLY, AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS?" Hana, Fujiko, and Chisa guilt-tripped various others into joining the construction team through high-octane optimism, belligerence, and passive-aggression respectively, so that by the time Ran finished instructing the carpentry team on acceptable and unacceptable timber and got to the site they'd already laid down a respectable skeleton, which Botan made her stand against for Chimaki to sketch while she said things like "I just want to remember this" and "Make sure you get her under-eye circles, that shows her dedication." Semimaru made an astonishing bento for everyone courtesy of Matsuri and Ayu's test plot, except gratuitous favorites Ryo and Natsu, who got "delicacies of my own, you know, devising to convey my like feelings and shit...like seasoned with my manly tears" (Ryo ate his; Natsu equivocated successfully for the entire lunch break and was able to dodge it). When Ran was able to stop glaring at lounging well-fed people and return to her tent she found hers sitting on her desk assembled in a kit of compasses and scales (these taken out, wrapped in a cloth, and set next to it), a curlicue of tangy orange sauce over the rice and stewed seedpods, reading "WHAT DO YOU CALL AN ARCHITE--OK I DON'T HAVE ROOM!! I'LL TELL YOU LATER GOOD LUCK O-RAN-SAN!" along with a handwritten note assuring her that the components of this bento were in no part stolen. 

Nijiko worked the plumbing systems that ran from the public hall to the four living capsules. She handpicked Team Ants' Nest, spelunkers who came out every day covered in dirt and sustained more injuries from Hana's daily rock climbing seminar than any of the construction. Team Treehouse, a crew of Summer A's, were building an updated edition of the same structure for the second time, got it done in about five days flat, and spent most of their time dangling their feet off their deck, copying out Iwashimizu Natsu's ethnographic fieldnotes as required reading. Only half of Team Log Cabin was actually familiar with this type of house, its Western wall plan; many people passed by their plot the day Hotaru was rapturously reciting to Ango the plot of the entire Anne of Green Gables anime. Team Seaside Contingency, composed mainly of veteran Spring members who had spent their first three months on a raft, did very well at building the actual rafts and promptly forgot to yoke them together at night, which resulted in a daylong voyage on Summer B's Raionmaru to spear stray rafts and haul them back in to a coldly impassive Nijiko, who had to be consoled with a scandalous naked session in a kitchen tent that was all well and good until they knocked over a pot of glue.    

At night they lay flush together and talked about the day's construction troubles until they ran out, and then about their teammates until that ran out, and then about the world and the things in it, more and more somber with the idea that that would never run out, and on the third day of this Nijiko pushed her against the tentpole, hand firm up her shirt, and said, "I didn't do as much data gathering as I should have." Ran came three times, Nijiko's mouth on her breasts, her sharp teeth, thumb wet and light and inexperienced on her clit until she took her by the wrist and showed her how to use her middle finger, Nijiko's thumb snagged in her navel so she braced herself against her palm when her hips surged off the sticky sleeping bag. When she used her tongue Nijiko came so silently and efficiently, precise in her descriptions of what exactly she wanted, it was every fantasy Ran would have had if she'd known then it was on the table, the fine crinkling of the expressionless paper face, like liquid sweeping across the surface, seeking the point of contact. 

In the morning, Matsuri sighed when she saw them, Arashi went scarlet, and Ayu was seen having intrigued conversation with Nijiko during which Aramaki was called over and forced to listen to Nijiko explain something in a flat voice. Chisa took Ran aside and let her get halfway through her tea before making a big show of inviting Botan in and saying, "How did you _know_ O-Ran-san was here? Imagine  _that_! These tents! You can hear  _everything_!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

One day Nijiko had a nightmare; Ran didn't realize it until she woke up and she'd gone completely stiff, the looseness of her entire body resolved into tight knots. She laid a hand on her stomach. 

"What were you dreaming of?" she asked, and found nothing to say when Nijiko said, ice in her voice, "I thought I was home."

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

She left the seashell on her drafting table, but the day the hall was ready for windows Nijiko took it away and put it in her own drawer. "Don't rely on that," she said, "I said I'd take it when I needed it, you should do the same." It had amused Ran enough to clear the desk, letting her mind sweep calm more and more, the way a deep lake grew more still, until she could reach into the limpid depths and draw a design for the four windows in their frame. Autumn maple leaves, a spring cherry tree, tulips in the summer, and an evergreen tree with snowdrifts whipping about it like Aramaki's long hair.   

She went with Nijiko down to the survey site where they wanted to grow soybeans. It turned out to be situated below and slightly to the right of her public hall. Nijiko showed her the river, the ancient waterwheel that she refused to crank and start properly. "It'll flood this area," she said, gesturing out over the hall as they came back up. "And then the hall will sink--not right away, after a week or so. You can grow and irrigate like that, but you can't build something with a foundation."

"What about what you're building?" 

"That's a level below this one."

Still, there was something about watching her explain the old waterwheel anyway, giving it one cautious spin that kicked up a blast of wind from the river, surprisingly strong, lifting both of their hair and making Nijiko put her hand in front of her face, eyelashes fluttering. Ran realized suddenly that she could see her like this, in ten or twenty years, Nijiko a constant enshrined as easily as once she'd thought her windows would be. The lines her face would take on. It was a frightening thing, to think of loving someone the way she'd loved the idea of growing old as a builder; she thought she'd broken the habit of falling in love with her life the way it was, her own trajectory. But here, on a drowsy grey morning watching Nijiko close her eyes against an unexpected wind, she thought for the first time in years that there might have been something worth exploring in it.  

"It's going to be hard to leave this behind," she said that day, as they watched Ryusei and Akane lay frames into the completed hall. On the grass, Ango had set up a sort of smithy into which he was melting frames for wroughtwork, that would later hold whatever replacements for dyed glass they could find--seashells, probably, or bits of metal. "Harder--than the first time. It's going to be harder." Kurumi was walking around near it, admiring the finish, a bright reddish color Ran had chosen because it looked, in a certain light, like the pelt of the horse she'd been brushing down in her Team Autumn case picture. The empty spaces of the windows gleamed out behind her like missing teeth.

She thought of walking over there and asking how she liked it, and then she didn't. She'd thought it thirty or forty times during the building.

Nijiko was silent, lost in her own thoughts. The sea breeze lifting and turning her hair the way the wind off the waterwheel river had. Her responsiveness to the water taking precedence. She'd been underground with her spelunking crew all day and had come back subdued again, but here her quietness shifted gears and became a manageable calm.

As if aware of what she was thinking, Nijiko said, blandly, "We lived together with our loved ones, doing what we loved until the end."

"...My goodness. Look at you."

"Yes. Is it meaningful? I'm just quoting."

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

The day before the wedding she was up to her eyes in seashells and bits of metal, scrambling to jury-rig a welding mechanism out of what was little more than adhesive. “You don’t have to knock, Nijiko,” she said, and apologized when Botan came in instead, clocking the trays of metal and seashells scattered around the tent. She was wearing one of Akane’s diving bathing suits and eating a handful of aloe from a stalk in her hand; she looked fresh and happy, as though her skin had given off green sap instead of sweat at the sites. As the only guide left she was rotating through the building teams, taking notes, relaying feedback. 

“Doesn’t she?” Botan smiled. “She’s lovely, but workplace relationships were frowned-upon in my line of work, you know. Should I write you up?”

Ran smiled in spite of herself and waved at the jumble of papers, hoping to indicate a self-serve seat. _Lovely_ was the last thing she’d ever seen out of Nijiko in her life. Sexy, in the way a silent coupling capacitor or a perfect piston was sexy, beautiful, in the way symmetry was beautiful. Mostly she was just an optimal version of herself. A drawing without any eraser lines. “Relationship is an awfully generous word. What can I get you?”

“I thought you might come out with me to tan for the big day,” said Botan pleasantly. “You’ve got a great one, though I guess that’s probably manual labor. Am I doing the older woman mentor thing right?”

“Are you ever going to let that go? And is this about the hall windows?” Botan shrugged. “Jesus. Can’t a woman make one professional decision around here without getting reported?”

“Not around Natsu. She notices everything.” She licked a bit of the aloe off the pad of her thumb and Ran wondered what professional decisions were subtextual here. “Anyway, I promised you a beer, Ran-chan, but ain’t it funny, some architect’s been awfully hyperfocused and we haven’t been able to expedite a fermentation room.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Never trusted architects. White-collar crime--”

“For god’s sake, I’m coming. Bikini optional, right.”

“If _Nijiko_ doesn’t mind.”

They went down past the building rill to where the compound living quarters were being built. Ryo, silver bells glinting at his wrists, was administering gunpowder to the hillside in preparation for the underground shelter project while Matsuri rappelled fretfully with Ran’s binoculars, picking up the soil as she went, turning it over in her fingers, tying daisies to the loam to indicate tree roots to be avoided. From time to time she beamed at Hana, who belayed her rope with admirable fluency at the foot of the face. 

Botan chose a spot for them in the sun-facing side of a willow-like tree. They spread out cloths, shucked off their shirts, scooped jellied handfuls out of the aloe stalk and spread it cooling on their shoulders and backs. When Ran lay down Botan pulled her hair gently off her neck; the ease of the gesture shored up a softness in her chest as readily as it had in the shelter. It wasn’t clear now, with some distance from the book, who she was jealous of. Iwashimizu Natsu, maybe, who had looked at her with such disgust even the first time she’d come to the village: our guide wouldn’t have. Please stop. And indeed she wouldn’t, meeting that guide now. Maybe Botan was the one whose decisions she wanted to have made, rather than the one she'd wanted to make decisions for her. She closed her eyes and turned her head away, feeling for the peace of Haru and Koruri’s closed eyes.

“Kurumi’s looking happy. Blushing bride, et cetera.”

“Mm-hm. Being pregnant at the wedding is good luck or something...on the coast. Was.” She hadn’t made that mistake in years. "You know Nijiko gave Ryo the Ryugu diary to do Maria's last dress. Apparently he sews. Can you even imagine anything more morbid?"

"Than taking fashion notes from Ryugu or having Ryo make your wedding dress? It's a real toss-up. Team Autumn's got morbid on lockdown." She made a V for victory. "Go to ruin, Japan!"

"Oh, shut up. If she wants a wedding, she gets one for being a good sport about popping out a kid in an ants' nest, though the idea of Sakuya officiating is just...ugh." They examined one another's shoulders and Botan signaled for her to turn. "Haru says he'll play loudly at the parts where Tsunomata doesn't remember the words to things. Anyway, she's going to apprentice that kid to Nijiko, so if it doesn't die it'll have a great--fine. Maybe a little morbid."

“You’re unexpectedly traditional, Ran-chan. Demanding someone's firstborn?”

“Comes of the white-collar crime.” Botan laughed. There was something about her that made you want to share all your accomplishments. It should have been what Ran had hoped in the nest, like an intern inviting a beloved supervisor out for dinner after flicking through her portfolio slides, but instead it was more like being a kid with a fistful of crayons who had a teacher with a bare refrigerator. "So--you shouldn't worry. I'm not dragging my feet on the windows. They'll be done on time."

"Savoring it?"

She thought about it. "Maybe."

Down in the valley Ayu was putting her hair up into its bun, cast about for a tie, and lacking one reached over and took Aramaki's baseball cap from his back pocket. It wasn't at all a remarkable practice except for the languid, deliberate way she did it, shaking her head twice to make it curtain in front of her face, raking her fingers through it from scalp to root to separate the locks into a frieze of chaotic gold. It could have been a halo if the term weren't inappropriate to something so obviously calculated. Her entire upper body worked in concert, the muscles under her jacket straining diligently, it was like watching a grain thresher split a pea. By the time she straightened up, Aramaki was staring at her with such naked longing to approach her that she faltered, angered or dismayed that she'd provoked the reaction she wanted without trying. The hesitation shook him loose and he turned away. Her shoulders stiffened; she went back to the plot of petally pink lotuses she'd been laying.  

Ran watched them and thought that she'd remember these things now, when she thought of it all. People in their haphazard or orderly or careful constructions of happiness, not the mortar and bones of the buildings of her girlhood. This was what would appear when she thought of the year they built a place with windows. 

"Too good to be true," she said, and then turned when Botan didn't respond. "What's the matter?"

"Why hasn't Nijiko-san been working on the second-level waterwheel?"

It was like a douse of cold water. "What? She's been going every day."

"I've been supervising construction down at the four shelters, you know that. I went down there yesterday. Whatever she's doing, it's not the waterwheel."

Ran's eyes had closed, now flickered open. "What?"

"And she took Ryo on survey two days ago, Natsu said. Do you know what's going on?"

"No," said Ran. The last time she'd missed one of Nijiko's cues this way it'd been in the combined settlement, a miss. But she didn't miss them anymore. The nightmare about home came back to her, the odd reticence about the underground river--on a mountain, she now recalled. There was something she should have remembered about that.

She got up, and brushed off her clothes. 

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

Matsuri and a few others were having a farcical bachelorette party to celebrate Kurumi's last unmarried night and a quick turn around the bonfires told her that Nijiko hadn't shown up there either, oddly, for once, none of the other Summer A's had either, not even Ban or Koruri. Ran wandered through the gathering, checking in on random people, then left to clear her head. When she passed the hall, Tsunomata was running Shinto vows in a clear, sonorous voice in the main chamber, breaking occasionally to talk acoustics with Haru. 

The sun dispersed across the valley in a complex rippling pattern of light and oscillating shadow, clouds moving with great speed across the field where the hall in violet dark looked ominously like a ruin. She shivered; she pulled Nijiko’s jacket closer around herself.

Then, in a purple-shadowed part of the valley where the grass was fresher, she saw Aramaki and Ayu striding away from one another to take batting and pitching positions. There was a certain stiffness to their postures that told her they weren’t speaking properly again yet but she could see dragonflies dancing about them, mummifying under the heat, zigzagging from one of them to another slowly and with the motions they relaxed a little, enough for Aramaki to take a long, indulgent set. Encroaching twilight, still serene enough for afternoon yet, and Ayu hit everything he gave her with a brutal split-handed grip, blurring out what would have been the strikezone with a few savage slashes, her hands eight centimeters apart on her stick as though about to poleax an imaginary catcher.

Aramaki’s arms windmilled to wider and wider stretches. He threw her beautiful clothesline fastballs. She hit them. He threw her curves, junky changeups, sliders that dribbled fitfully out of the strikezone. She cracked them open like walnuts. He laughed then, one single bark like one of his dogs. He ran a finger around his gums and fired with an open palm and Ayu crushed the spitball into the fat pastel bulk of Koruri’s weather balloon pinkly hanging in the distance. Ayu didn’t chance misses but when Aramaki looked at her he looked like he was remembering that reckless rush of a swing-and-miss strikeout anyway, the catcher’s face gone hot and then cool.

Ran sat down on the hill outside the hall, stayed out watching them in more daylight than she thought they’d have been allotted for so late in the dry season, more than enough light to kindle the skylights in the hall with sudden fire. Ayu made oars of her swings and rowed them all shoreward through a sea of heat. It wasn’t anyone’s home yet but here, suddenly, they’d laid down a memory. Love-drunk dragonflies. Grass under their sandals, green as poison.

She sat upright suddenly.  _When we couldn't even talk yet_ , Aramaki had said, about the time before they'd left. When they'd needed something beyond an apology or a way of making things right, only something that could serve as a promise that they could get there. 

She got up. She bolted down the hill to her tent, not stopping even when the wound in her side from the ants opened up again a little, the stitches straining. She tore open Natsu's fieldnotes from survey and read them more carefully now. Natsu didn't know how to keep proper architectural notes and she hadn't done it, splicing in random observations and dutifully overheard segments of dialogue in a way that was now exactly what Ran was looking for. One of the things she'd decided to keep was materials lists. Ran flipped back to the day Ayu and Matsuri had had their fight about the soybeans, and then she read the list. She read it again. She understood, slow and serene, that what Nijiko had been stockpiling here weren't the right supplies to build a waterwheel. 

When she bundled her rope and carabiners into her bag she wasn't thinking of that anymore. All she was thinking was of Nijiko in their tent, always insolent, contradicting her own stupid creed and waiting for her to come to that understanding. Waiting for her to notice. And she hadn't, when it had been so obvious. In her drafting drawer, the seashell was gone.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

By the time she got to the underground shelter she knew she was right; there was no waterwheel reassembled or repaired here. Instead there was a pylon stretching out of the dark, brand new, in wroughtwork like the sort Ango had been making for days to finish the stained glass shelter.

Nijiko stood alone at its base, looking up into the place where its top was swallowed by the darkness of underground, the dark blue night beyond it cut with stars. She looked like a waterskimmer, or a leaf on the tide. When Ran stumbled into the water she turned, eyes expressionless behind their safety glasses. Ran strode up to her and pushed her hard enough backwards to earn a chaotic splash of water. 

"What the hell are you doing?" she said, fists shaking, "what is that? Is this what you've been building instead of a new waterwheel?"

"That's a zipline," said Nijiko, patient through drenched. "A zipline is a goods carrier consisting of two pylons--"

"I'm not in the mood, Nijiko. Answer me straight or keep your mouth shut."

"I'm explaining to you." Her voice was ice. "To set up a soybean plot here, you'll still need expertise and materials transport from another settlement. I've seen people die here because materials transport was too difficult. So in order to achieve that most efficiently, I've designed this zipline--"

She had one card to play. One coin to flip into the wishing-well and this was another thing she might have liked to show Nijiko, if circumstances had been different, a floor of water shattered by glitter and hopes. She understood now that she'd been operating under an erroneous assumption that because she wanted to show it, she might have wanted to see it. There was nothing else to do now but cast the coin, so she did. 

"You're leaving."

Nijiko didn't move, didn't take her eyes from her. "Yes."

"When?"

"After the wedding. We'll be staying involved to cooperate--we hardly mean to go far. Just off Sado. Somewhere new. It won't change anything."

"That's not the point. How do you  _consistently_ miss the point?"She was opening and closing her hands, as though unable to believe there was nothing in them. She wished she'd brought her levels, or her Razorpoint, or anything except her useless rope and climbing tools as though this was really only a chase. "How could you let me build--let me talk about this place--like it was...what we thought it was. Like this was going to be the permanent settlement."

"You didn't ask."

"So if I do now, what do you plan to tell me?"

"How did you think I knew there was an underground river under this part of the mountain--that it used to be a mountain?" said Nijiko. "Why do you think I haven't let Ango work on my construction team? How do I know people died here for lack of proper materials transport? This is it. We Summer A already know this site."

"Oh, Nijiko."

"You were right, perhaps. It came back. This is where we were raised. This was where we were tested." She pushed her hair back, bangs falling forward again. It was the first thing Ran had noticed about her, first in which she'd recognized her. "Ideal beings in an ideal place. We should have known."

"I never thought you--what am I saying. Of course it bothers you. Of course it bothers everyone." She was only shocked because it was _Nijiko_ ; even the awfulness of the idea of living there would never have bothered her once. But then she smiled, that faux-gentle expression with which she'd tossed the seashell back. "But you  _admit_ it. My god. You admit you can't stay here because of it. You can't forget."

"I find it interesting," said Nijiko, "that you can admire it in me, when you hate it so in yourself."

She was proud of her, distantly. She couldn't stop that anymore than she could stop the way she reacted to her. Her whole self become dry parchment, eager to soak up directionless ink, convert it to fractals on their paths.  

"You're the only person who has ever expected that of me," Nijiko said. The smile slipped off her face. "Now it's become a habit. Are you happy?"

All of that long first autumn of her stay in the new world Ran had worked through the fields, the frames, the buildings, the forests, the rivers and one long day, when the pampas grass had burned out and there was only the silent village with its windowless rooms, she woke up and looked at the sicksweet smoky ceiling of her hut and thought: surely I will die tonight, because I cannot live through one more day of this. And then the next morning she had woken up, and it was another day.

She should have gone to Nijiko now but she understood then that this girl, who had made her able to want to go to anyone at all, given that part of herself back to her, didn't expect it of her. The turning of the waterwheel was drowned out then by another noise, as though of glass shattering in a thousand small frames. It was indistinguishable from the forest fires that had felled her villages twice. She thought it was fitting she should hear it again now. 

"You didn't tell me," she said, slow so that she could see her nod. She had to see her nod.

"You'd begun building, Ran. You told me it would be harder to leave again than it was before."

"You didn't tell me something like  _this_ because you thought I'd put some old dream about building above the people that made--"

She thought a wave of water had hit her in the chest, knocking the breath out of her, but she was dry and dry-eyed, watching the deterioration in front of her. It's not like that, what you did to your teammates, Nijiko had said, when Ango and Ryo left. She'd been under the impression all this while that Nijiko had seen the best in her; she'd made a grave miscalculation, she'd seen the worst. She'd gotten careless, used to tangled-up limbs, steady hands on straight lines,  _Ran_ instead of  _O-Ran-san_ and here they were now, no more chances. She'd been a girl who could build with the most delicate material in the world and know it'd turn to something beautiful and secure in her hands, and now she'd failed at the most important thing she would ever build.

Ask me to come with you, she thought, the last thing she was entitled to say. But instead of saying it she stood impassive as Nijiko left her, the shattering noise scintillating outwards in her mind. She couldn't look at her. Gotten into a habit, she'd said, as though they could have done this to one another through nothing more than accident. As though they hadn't done it to one another for a worse reason, the same reason it had been in Autumn Village. Only a surfeit of love. 

 

 

 

 

 

~ 

 

 

 

 

 

The first time she'd made stained glass she'd put her fingers on it, her five frantic fingerprints soaking up the purple dye more quickly than the glass, and she'd expressed her frustration until her supervisor showed her the dye running in rivulets off the surface, beads of sheened violet, and said: it'll only take the best of the dye, the rest of it will roll off like rainwater, that's why you should love it, it will only show you the best of what you made, that's how it stays so clear. That's how it lasts forever.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

She woke on the morning of the wedding to a knock from Karita, the welder who had replaced Ango. She had to show him half a tray of incomplete stained glass on the Autumn window, the first missed deadline of her life.

Matsuri came to her tent with Natsu and a snatch of the pink lotus blossoms Ayu had okayed as native to the Sado ecosystem, now wound into a string of what looked like Nijiko's discarded ant mandibles and twisted through Ran's hair. Matsuri murmured about how beautiful it was as she shifted it through her fingers. "If I step into that hall and see I have the same hairstyle as Ryo, I will feed your hairbrush to a piss dinosaur," Ran said flatly, to which Matsuri made an indignant noise and discreetly shifted her sideswept bun from the right to left side of her head. While she was busy pinning a few of Ran's shirts into the bandage dress she'd decided on for the Team Autumn women, Ran glanced at Natsu, who was gazing back at her in the same way she had the first time they'd met: with pity. She massaged her temple. 

"Natsu, thanks," she said in an undertone. "Thanks for noticing something was off with her." Natsu shrugged, then abruptly reached out and took one of Ran's hands in her own clammy one. The gesture distressed her so much she withdrew it immediately, but the abrupt pressure stayed. Ran looked away. 

After having worked with practically the entire settlement on construction, it was dispiritingly easy to avoid its members, especially on this morning, pleasant fog and sunlight rolling in from the northeast in waves, on the petals of flowers, the kind of concentrated fantasy of the past that had made Sado look like paradise when they'd come up out of the anthill. She didn't want to hear anyone say it on that day of all days so she went directly to Kurumi's tent, where Akane was helping her twist a few tendrils of hair away from her face, into the hood she'd wanted for Tsunomata's traditional ceremony. Something about the little tableau and the way they looked up, waiting for Ran, made her step back, oddly shy to enter as she'd never been in her life. 

Still, some hard thing laid among her feelings approximated relief. That she could say what she'd been thinking since Kurumi had gotten pregnant, under the guise of something mundane. She put up her hands, groping for a semblance of glibness.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I couldn't finish your stained glass windows."

"O-Ran-san--" Kurumi began, but Akane said, "Only you would think of something like that! Come here, help us with the hood. I can't believe she wanted to wear a hood with a scandalous strapless dress."

"It's Tsunomata-san's first time doing a Shinto wedding, I want it to be recognizable from Chimaki's sketches!" protested Kurumi. "O-Ran-san, truly, I'm not worried about stained glass in the least. But I kept my lotus blossoms aside--would you help me pin them into my hair, under the hood?" 

Ran picked them up and went over to her. She wove the flowers into the braided bun in the back. She hadn't touched Kurumi since Autumn Village and she expected a flinch, but there was nothing, only the peachy skin of the back of her neck, the odd gelid peace that emanated from her now, getting something she'd wanted in a way she hadn't expected to get it. And maybe Ran was running on less sleep than she'd needed for this endeavor, or maybe she just  _really_ hated weddings because she found herself opening her mouth and saying, like the most awful killjoy, "I really am sorry it's not what you deserved."

Kurumi looked astonished. "How can you say that?"

"Was this what you wanted?"

"Well, no." Kurumi stared at her, and then she reached behind her and took Ran's hands, and guided them to her neck, under the voluminous hood. She was wearing Hana's silver necklace, the one that had had belonged to her mother. 

Ran tried to pull away but Kurumi shook her head, then, quiet. "No," she said, "look at me. You're allowed, or rather--"

"You owe it to us," said Akane. "Isn't that what you wanted to hear."

So she did, then. She held her gaze and looked at Hana's necklace, the hood and dress bodice which she could see now were done with Summer B's torn sail and the set of spotless mosquito netting Chisa had maintained in Spring for months. Matsuri had done an iteration of Botan's braided twist for her hair. White charcoal, tingling every time she moved, woven into a choker with a pattern like a girl's friendship bracelets. The netting was caught up and pinned with seashells of every color and stripe that she'd seen Akane and Arashi lug back, Semimaru's hands bandaged where he extricated the shellfish from particularly sharp ones without damaging them. A sheaf of used aloe stalks in one of Ayu's baskets, with the same ruddy glow they'd given Botan on her face now, and then on the table beyond her--a facepack wrapped in cloth, molded in the shape of a brick, and one of the shower flutes. 

Tears pricked Ran's eyes. She'd never have been able to stand this in the four years since she came, except now. She didn't lower her gaze. Kurumi took her hands.

"I could never have imagined something like this," she said, "so no. It's not what I wanted." 

She wouldn't be forgiven, she thought, and then: that was all right. She hadn't wanted that and it was all right to live without that, with what was left. It was her team. If it wanted, it could keep what was left of the grudge it had inherited. She stood for long moments there, her hands warm in Kurumi's own, the tears untempered, molten sun and the cold morning on her bare shoulders. And then she said, in a flat voice, why she hadn't finished the stained glass.

"I didn't want to ruin your day," she said.

"You didn't tell me something like that," said Kurumi, slowly, "because you thought I'd put some old dream above the people who made me this?"

Nijiko standing at the base of the waterwheel, her own preferences and ideas, the things she hadn't understood made her more effective, folded back into herself like the retracting components of a blade. Did you feel this way, Ran thought, and then: of course you did, of course you ever did. I get it now, it's not my job to make you let go of your caution.

Only to build you a place where you can.

"She's not you," said Akane, a little sharply. They laughed. The two of them wiped their eyes; they laughed at her. 

A breeze came through the open tent flap, stirring the lotus blossoms at Kurumi's temples. In another time, four years ago, a girl with a grudge woke up and made a choice to stand against the possibility of this day ever happening. She was right, and she was wrong. You got the choice back not to make it right, but to make it again. That was all you were guaranteed. 

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

She fetched Aramaki, Chisa, Kurumi, Botan, the rest of the Summer A's. When Ran got to Ayu, she said, "If I were a civilian, I would resent us for it." Her lips parted. "Being unable to forget what happened here."

"Don't you understand," said Ran, and felt the force, the truth of it come back to her across the years. "That's the one thing we can build around."

There was a long silence. Ayu bowed, her hair falling forward to hide her face. They'd never seen Summer A do it. No one was quite sure how to respond. 

"We've really done it," she muttered. "Swing-and-miss."

There was a long silence. Then suddenly, with his preternatural speed, Aramaki darted forward, lifted her off her feet, and spun her in a chaotic circle. She wound her arms around his neck, looking thunderstruck. "It's a correct use of terminology," she said defensively. Her fingers interlocking on the back of his neck, shaking. Forcing him to meet her eyes. He pushed her hair back with both hands and kissed her on the mouth. "No it's not, you airhead," he said, laughing through his tears, "this is when you call it home."   

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

"Postponing the wedding by four hours is terrible luck," droned Haru, checking an imaginary watch, going pink, and then peering around hatefully to check if anyone had noticed. "Gengoro. Gengoro, Morse Koruri, tell her: let's never do this at our wedding."

Gengoro looked skeptical but relayed this dutifully up to the glider, which winked back a flurry of little lights.

"'I don't think I will ever marry,'" he read in a monotone. "'Fujiko-san says I am just like a wild graceful bird who should always fly free.'" He paused. "'Because I fly. Do you get it.'"

"Tell her I was just saying we should never do this because I coincidentally never want to get married," Haru explained without blinking, "And that I totally get it. Birds fly and she flies. It's so true. But she can't land, unlike a bird." He paused. "That's why I--"

"If you say you'll always be there to catch her, I will set my attack dog on you myself," said Ayu, who had been listening to this for the past four hours between the task she'd been set. Ran made a mental note to leave her a bouquet of belladonna for her very own personal use. "Ran-san, I can't stand another word of--"

"There!" exclaimed Gengoro. "She says they're coming, Kurumi-san and Nijiko. They're about two minutes away. Is Karita where he needs to be?"

"You bet he is. Morse Ban, he's with him, and tell them to start the wheel in exactly half an hour. Haru, you know what to do. I don't want them to be able to hear it."

He nodded self-importantly. "I'll play Orpheus," he said, rather pointedly. "For Ayu-san, since it was playing the last time she left."

"She isn't leaving alone this time," said Aramaki.

"You were there last time too, don't be so sentimental in public. It makes me uncomfortable," said Haru, causing them all to stare at him until he turned his head, hearing the waterwheel turning underground before any of them did. "Ah," he said knowledgeably. "Into the hall, please. My performance is starting."

"Technically the  _wedding_ is--"

"That's what I said." 

The main chamber of the hall was sheathed in golden light, silver fog, all the coexisting serenities of the island and their promise. Ran had deliberately designed it with a low ceiling, intuiting that when it was full, as it was now, it would be the crush of people that seemed like the greatest luxury, not the expanse of empty space above their heads. She entered from a side door but everyone looked at her like she was the bride anyway until she inclined her head disapprovingly at Natsu and Matsuri, who giggled and went immediately to the windows covered in tacked-up paper, and began taking the coverings down. She sat Ayu down next to Chisa, Fujiko, and Hana. 

The first bars of Haru's Orpheus rang out into the space, the charcoal organ giving it a resonance the piano had never had. It didn't surprise her. The place had been built with him in mind, after all. She couldn't feel the waterwheel under their feet but she knew no one would be able to hear it when it started, not with the music.

"Thanks for getting me the flowers," she said to Ayu in an undertone. "I didn't expect you to."

Ayu shrugged, but her hands were clenched tight in her lap. Matsuri had drawn her hair back from her face and curled it with tongs so that it looked like Aramaki's, it made the marble hardness of her face stronger, accentuating the novelty of such softness. You looked at her; you knew she'd grow old the same way she was now. No matter how much she changed. "We didn't expect anyone to want to come with us." 

"All you had to do was trust us," said Fujiko brightly from Ran's other side. 

"Well, and about twelve other--we'll put it to a vote, of course," said Chisa cautiously. Fujiko glanced at her, smiled, looked away at what the Summer B girls were doing. "But I think you'll find quite a few people want to be together. Wherever that happens."

Hana said nothing, giving Ran only a small, sharp-edged smile. She didn't hold Ayu's hand or make eye contact with her, but when Ayu slid a hair tie off her wrist and handed it back to her, she drew a hand over her ponytail, smoothening it down. They looked front, comfortably meshed with one another. An ecosystem in perfect balance. Ran rolled her eyes and looked for Ryusei. When she found him, he looked halfway distinguished in a black hakama made of a Summer A storm tent (Chimaki had been instructed to keep the visible athletic logo present in sketches). Ran smacked Ayu on the shoulder. "'Thanks for accommodating my building deadlines,'" she said blandly. Ayu smirked and Morsed it over to Koruri, who had landed and darted over to the front of the hall where she'd stand with Kurumi. She tapped Ryusei on the shoulder and relayed it in a breathless voice that surely didn't carry the inflection Ran had intended; but he found her in the back, sent her a halfhearted salute, cracked his lopsided grin.

And then the hall went quiet except for the organ in its upper register, shifting into a different key. The last covering came off the windows. The light changed, and the floor was set ablaze, burned with color. Ran saw Kurumi head to the front where Ryusei and Tsunomata waited to a cheerful starburst of applause. Faking an interest in wedding vows was probably beyond what was reasonably expected of her at this point, so she crossed her arms and tuned out, admiring the slide and interface of the colors the ground. Everything swept a little hazy, a little surreal by the softness of the watered light.

A sense of the old sea shored up in her, receded. She waited. 

"Lotus blossom petals," came a low voice behind her, "golden birch leaves, and aloe stalks. Adhesive looks like...sap, not thread. I thought you said stained glass was a high-class accoutrement."

"Yeah, turns out everyone in this settlement is an incredibly cheap date," Ran replied, not turning around. "Three hundred and twenty lotus blossom petals, to be exact. I'm all about affordability."

Dark circles under her eyes. Clean jersey shirt with the sleeves pushed up, hands in her pockets, chin lifted. "Is this what it looked like?" Nijiko asked, expressionless. 

"This is what it looked like."

"Congratulations."

"Thanks."

They watched the light play over the group of people, the hall they'd built together. Kurumi and Ryusei at the front repeating after Tsunomata's words. Koruri was air-conducting absently to the music, though she likely didn't know what conducting was. Chisa and Fujiko had bent their heads together, alone again in a crowd of people as they now would be forever, perhaps, having once touched that total solitude. Natsu looked back at Ran and Nijiko, smiled with half of her mouth, and turned back to the front, looking at her hands in the diffused color. It was everything Ran had wanted to see, a sight that could have saved her life in the year she'd come and she knew Nijiko knew it, and studied it this way because of knowing it. It steadied her. 

"I don't like it," mumbled Nijiko, "it seems conducive to sentimentality. It's problematic. And it's flimsy--it won't last."

"I don't care," Ran said. Beneath her feet, a shudder from the underground river: the waterwheel had been turned on. "I want to show you something. Nijiko, shut up. It's rude to talk during weddings."

A mirror flashed at the front of the hall. Koruri was looking out one of the windows. Nijiko stiffened. "That's a countdown. What is it for?"

"Who knows. Probably something sentimental. I hate weddings." 

Three, two, one. And then the shudder under their feet resolved itself into something Nijiko understood.

She turned immediately to leave but Ran grabbed her arm. Below the earth, the waterwheel turned. The vows finished at the front of the hall. Koruri turned her head into the sudden siphon of wind, anticipating it. And then three hundred and twenty lotus blossom petals, a shower of golden birch leaves and aloe stalks burst from their moorings in the windowframes and swept through the hall in a cloud of pink, green, and gold, taking on a hundred more colors as they filled the hall with all the density and lightness of snow. Nijiko's lips parted, faced with so much destruction at once. Ran waited for it. And then people began to cheer, throwing the petals about in fistfuls. The feeling of being inside a kaleidoscope, subject to a thousand blissfully fracturing memories. Matsuri and Semimaru threw open the double doors at the back of the hall and the flowers sped out into the sunlit afternoon after Kurumi and Ryusei, ushered along laughing, the downdraft tossing the petals down the grassy rill, towards the living quarters, out to the places where they set bonfires, into the distance, towards the glittering line of the sea. 

"The waterwheel," said Nijiko, stunned. "You turned on the--are you insane? The river will flood. The hall will collapse within a week." 

"Fine," said Ran. I'm not the type to hold a grudge, she wanted to say, just for the pleasure of laughing at the absurdity of it, but she couldn't laugh now, releasing her grip on Nijiko's upper arm. It was nothing like the flames of the last village but she saw it now, the flickering light of that night dawning across Nijiko's face. How she must have looked then. The person she had become. "We're even. No power over me. And now it has no power over you either."

Flowers in their hair--the stupid sentimentality of it. That she could laugh at. Something in her that had stayed moored since her first morning in the new world, hitched, gave, was worked loose and released into the air with the rest of it. She laid her hand over Nijiko's cheek. She smudged free the remaining dust of years. "Didn't I tell you?" she said. "Leave the areas requiring building to me."

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

A week later, the first construction team left the Sado Ant's Nest to begin the sister settlement on the mainland. They took blueprints for the zipline, plenty of distress flares, and a wagon full of homemade bento boxes. The rest of the contingent stayed behind to care for the new baby and her mother, both of whom had been moved into the treehouse living shelter for its natural light and ease of ventilation. The baby had inherited none of the neurotic tendencies of either parent but operated within a coccoon of impenetrable placidity at all times, displaying an utter lack of concern for the chaotic circumstances surrounding her conception and birth. She eyed her sobbing father the moment she was placed into his arms with an expression familiar to anyone who had ever lived at the combined settlement, and smiled only once at Ryo of all people, whose manacles had chimed in her presence. This settled a longstanding debate over nomenclature with near unanimity. The mainland team stockpiled eight baby food recipes before even sitting down to a site survey, much to Ran's irritation, and kept running back to Sado every other day with plant samples, food, and milk, so that by the age of three weeks even in a preserved ecosystem Nijiko was already well acclimatized to the world of her birth. 

The structural integrity of the public hall was compromised as Nijiko had predicted, and a week to the day it sank into the bog still littered here and there with flower petals. They put a plate there with Chimaki's sketch mounted upon it, and Ran wrote an inscription underneath it, copying carefully by hand from the Ryugu diary. Ayu and Matsuri slashed-and-burned, composted the treated wood, and began growing potted soybeans in tiny, contained trial plots inside vinyl, that from a distance gave the place the appearance of a greenhouse. Summer A came back to Sado less and less, and the mainland settlement grew more and more crowded, the zipline taxed under the loads it bore, until construction began on a structure of dubious integrity optimistically dubbed the Homerun Bridge and tracks bit into the dirt from wagons, pushcarts, runners, and snowshoes. Once a week, Koruri flew between the settlements with a parcel of thickly handwritten packets emblazoned with an ant's head; Natsu having adamantly refused to name her newspaper. 

The exact trajectories were unclear. There was nothing resembling a permanent edifice in either of the settlements, but there were storm shelters, fire protocols, earthquake drills, rotating living shifts as things happened. Glasswork might survive, or it might become a lost art. She was angry often, and as often not. They built, because it was who they were. They could pick their reasons. Because the next thing would make them happy, because just because everyone could live together didn't mean they should, because architecture might find them a way to exist in the meantime. Because every life was valid, because people who mistrusted you needed a reason to begin again, and because you could never imagine, at the beginning of it, just what it was you wanted. Waterwheels ferried the sea into their mainland settlement and brought with them each time the scent of the new world's salt like an antiseptic, something that hurt and healed, its nature neither one or the other. 

Autumn came, on the heels of a ruthless summer. They took their blueprints down to the seashore, where there was no need to look forward or back. Up and down, in every direction, the same boundless, infinite stretch of blue, like light pouring through a pane of glass. Clear, limpid, pure.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

_And I believe I, too, did splendidly._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the end


End file.
